Xeno Trigger
by TheSeer
Summary: 1016 AD: A young prince and an apprentice inventor get caught up in a sneak attack on Guardia Castle. The gates of time are opened once again, and a new legend begins.
1. The Eve of War

The Eve of War

1016 AD, alpha timeline

-o-

_thump thump thump_

Zeo shifted in his sleep.

_thump thump thump_

"Your Majesty," came a faint voice, "are you awake?"

"Mmm," Zeo muttered, "my loyal subjects, you crave a boon?" No, wait. Zeo propped himself up on an elbow and shook his head. He wasn't "Your Majesty" yet. They were knocking on Mom and Dad's door, not his. He pried his eyes open. It was still night. In fact, it felt like Zeo had only been asleep for an hour or two. He ran a hand drowsily through his spiky blond hair.

"What on Earth is this racket?" That was Zeo's mother. "I hope you didn't decide to violate the..." a very slight hesitation, "…royal privacy for anything less than a state emergency." Zeo padded to his door and opened it. Across the hallway, Mom was standing in an open doorway, hair mussed, wearing a nightgown with a hastily tied sash. Behind her, Zeo glimpsed his father pulling on a tunic. Royal privacy indeed - yuck!

The soldier who'd knocked cleared his throat politely. "Yes, Queen Nadia. A message from our Ambassador in Medina, marked Urgent and Top Secret."

Zeo's father - Crono, King Guardia XXXIV - stepped up behind Mom and took the offered message. He broke the seal and read it quickly. He frowned and handed it to Mom.

"Dad?" Zeo said. "What's going on?"

Queen Nadia looked up from the message, her face paler than usual. "Go back to bed, Zeo. Lieutenant, summon the Privy Council at once." The solider bowed and left.

"Dad!" Zeo's father pointed sternly back into the room and followed the soldier downstairs.

"I'll be along as soon as I'm dressed, Crono," Mom called after him. "Zeo, close your door and go back to bed this instant. And don't think I won't check."

Zeo sighed, rolled his eyes, and slammed his door. Honestly. He was almost fifteen, and he'd been learning how to rule for two years, but whenever anything interesting happened it was "go back to bed, Zeo." He flumped into bed and pulled the covers over himself. Sure enough, after a couple minutes, his door opened quietly again, and closed as his mother saw him in bed.

Zeo promptly threw the covers off. He reached under his bed and pulled out a bag. Inside were clothes, not his usual court silks but rough grey and brown garments, the sort a kitchen boy or a worker's son from Truce would wear. Zeo shucked off his pajamas and pulled the disguise on. Not only did he not look like the Crown Prince, the colors were good for hiding and the material was tough and didn't restrict his movement.

At the bottom of the bag was a rope. Zeo tied one end around his bedpost and looked out the window. The castle was quiet - apparently the signals lieutenant had followed regulations, and no one but Mom, Dad, and Zeo knew about the message. But if the Privy Council were being summoned, things would get livelier pretty quick. Zeo tossed the free end of the rope out the window and climbed out.

-o-

_thump thump thump_

Kurt woke up with a start, and fell out of his narrow bed.

_thump thump thump_

"Mistress Lucca! I have a message from the King!" The voice was coming through Kurt's open window, from the front of the house.

Kurt fumbled clumsily at the nightstand until he felt his glasses. He pulled them on and went to the window. Mistress Lucca had already opened the door. "All right, what does Crono want? I'm busy." She had grease stains on her clothes and was holding a wrench. Apparently she'd been up late working.

"His Majesty has summoned the Privy Council," the messenger said, handing her a sealed note. He looked up and saw Kurt. "Who's that?"

Lucca had swiftly broken the seal and started reading. "Huh? Oh, that's just my apprentice. He's trustworthy, if that's what you're worried about." She called up to Kurt. "I have to go up to the castle. If I'm not back by morning, bring the order form on my workbench to Fritz and Elaine." Kurt nodded absently. His parents were the lab's main suppliers. He was always running orders and packages back and forth.

"What's up, Mistress?" he called down.

"Oh, some diplomatic nonsense. Melchior's been recalled, or some such. Nothing to worry about, go back to bed." Kurt nodded and moved away from the window, but then he paused. Mistress Lucca had made it sound like she hadn't known the Ambassador was coming. If the King and Queen were planning to recall the Ambassador to Medina, wouldn't they have told the Privy Council? Had Ambassador Melchior come back without orders? That would be _very_ strange; he was supposed to be completely loyal to the King and Queen.

A tinny mechanical voice came from the corner. "Does Master Kurt require anything?"

"Huh? No, Proto, I'm just thinking." The half-built robot's eyes flashed in acknowledgement. Then something occurred to him. "Proto, data search. Does the ferry to Medina run at night?"

"Processing." Some lights blinked. "Negative. The last ferry on today's schedule left Truce at 4 P.M. local time."

So Melchior was returning without orders on a commandeered ferry. "Extremely strange."

"I do not understand."

"I wasn't talking to you." Kurt rubbed his chin. "I'm going to investigate. Stay here, Proto."

"Acknowledged. Advisory: this unit is not currently capable of locomotion."

"Oh, right. I'll finish your legs soon, Proto, promise." Kurt dressed, and grabbed his satchel from the desk - there were several useful things in there. He went downstairs, through the empty lab, and out the back door.

-o-

Zeo was glad he'd practiced this climb. If he'd done it for the first time on a moonless night like this, he'd probably have fallen.

The trouble was, his bedroom was a recent addition, stuck onto the side of the northwest tower when he was born. "I did _not_," his mother had told him, "want to go down one tower and up the other for every feeding." Moving closer to the old nursery (and away from Dad) was apparently not even considered. In any case, Zeo's room hung out over empty space seventy feet above the flagstones. Getting down past the overhang was definitely tricky. (Getting _up_ was nearly impossible. He wasn't sure he even wanted to try it by starlight.)

If Zeo wanted to get out of the castle, he could climb all the way down to the courtyard, where he knew a way over the outer wall. But all the doors leading _in_ were guarded, at least the ones at ground level. So he had to swing in past the overhang and catch a ledge on the tower wall, since the new construction had no such conveniences. This was the real tricky part - he had to get himself swinging at just the right speed so he didn't fall short or bounce off.

But then, Zeo had practiced this. He reached the edge of the overhang, kicked off the wall, and let a measured amount of rope slide through his gloved hands. (He'd added gloves to his disguise after taking most of the skin off his palms trying that the first time.) Zeo firmed his grip, feeling the jolt in his shoulders, and swung back toward the wall. He'd timed it perfectly - at the top of the arc, he let go of the rope and landed on the narrow ledge.

Leaving the rope hanging from his window, Zeo edged along the side of the tower. It wasn't dangerously narrow, by his standards - it extended about a foot from the wall - but he didn't have room to walk normally. On the east face of the tower there was a gargoyle, its head level with the ledge. Zeo clambered down over the thing's shoulder and got his foot into an arrow slit. Hanging from that slit, the drop to the slate roof over the throne room was only about six feet.

Zeo landed on the slate with a thump, hoping Mom and Dad weren't meeting the Privy Council in the throne room for some reason. From here, it was easy going. He just had to climb up onto the judicial wing and squeeze through a window into one of the storage attics. There were no guards up here - after all, who would try to steal old court transcripts? Zeo was in. He heard Leene's bell ringing eleven in the distance.

-o-

Kurt's entry was much less athletic. He simply ran up to the gate waving a few pieces of paper. "Who goes there?" the guard officer said.

"It's just me," he said. "Mistress Lucca forgot these." He showed the guards the pages, covered in Mistress Lucca's handwriting and completely indecipherable to anyone but her and Kurt. It was actually some notes she'd made for him on Proto's knee articulation, but it could have been military diagrams or a soup recipe for all the guards could tell.

"That's the apprentice," the officer told his men. "Let him through." Kurt jogged into the castle with a wave. That trick always worked, because half the time it wasn't a trick. Mistress Lucca was always leaving her notes about, and she had no skill for organizing anything without gears and circuits in it.

The Privy Council would likely be meeting down in the map room, next to the barracks. They only sat in the throne room for formal or public meetings. Kurt trotted down the stairs like he owned the castle. Just outside the door was an antique suit of armor on a stand, hiding the weapon chests in the corner. Kurt passed the door and ducked behind the armor. He tried to step around the chests to find a hiding place, but his foot landed on something softer than the floor and lumpy.

Kurt wobbled and fell onto the chest. He had a dismayed moment to realize he was going to roll off the other side and knock over the armor. Then someone grabbed his shirt and pulled him back. Kurt smacked his head against the wall and landed behind the chest.

Blinking, he sat up and saw who he'd stepped on. "Thanks a lot, Zeo," he whispered. "That hurt." He should have realized the prince would be here first.

"Serves you right for stepping on my foot," Zeo whispered back. "Shut up and hide." Kurt ducked into the shadows.

"How sure are we that this information is correct, Your Majesty?" General Taron was saying.

"Melchior knows magic when he sees it," Queen Nadia answered. The King added something, but Kurt couldn't make it out.

"An attack on our ambassador!" the Chancellor huffed. "This is an act of war! The Mystics can't be allowed to get away with this." The Chancellor didn't like Mystics; something about a box that Kurt had never got the details of. "We should prepare our troops at once, Majesties."

"Hold on a minute," Mistress Lucca says. "Melchior's message didn't say he was attacked by Mystics. If he thought that. . ." She was cut off by several people at once. Kurt caught only a few words, "magic" and "hasty" and "war." He and Zeo looked at each other.

"War?" Kurt whispered. "With Medina?"

"Maybe," Zeo whispered back. He looked excited, and nervous.

"But we've always been friends with the Mystics," Kurt murmured. "Well, for four hundred years. Why are they attacking us now?"

"Melchior signaled us from his ship," the Queen said, cutting off the argument, "so he'll be here shortly. We can decide when we have the full story."

"Until he gets here," the Elder of Truce said, in his reedy voice, "we should discuss our plans for. . ." something Kurt didn't care enough to strain to hear. The Elder was a bit of a windbag.

"At least it sounds like Uncle Melchior's okay," Zeo whispered after a while.

"I wonder what this is about?" Kurt asked.

"I don't think anyone knows. Shh!" Kurt ducked. Around the armor, he saw Ambassador Melchior coming down the stairs. He was moving a bit slower than usual, Kurt thought, and his beard was singed. He was followed by two very nervous soldiers. "Thank you, gentlemen," he said once he was at the door. "That will be all." The soldiers saluted and went on into the barracks. Melchior went into the Map Room, but Kurt thought he saw the old man wink as he passed them.

"Did he see us?" Kurt hissed.

"Probably. Uncle Melchior's got eyes like a hawk." Zeo sounded almost proud. "Don't worry, he won't tell."

"Melchior!" several people said at once. "Ambassador," the Chancellor went on, "I'm so glad you escaped that heinous attack."

"Yes, well, this old man still has a few tricks up his sleeves."

"What exactly happened, Melchior?" Mistress Lucca asked.

"Well. In short, the spell Fire 2 was cast on my embassy nearly four hours ago. Of those in the building, only I survived, however, the two guards at the gate lived. I joined them, and learned they hadn't seen a thing except for the spell itself. We made our way to the dock. The mayor of Medina was waiting there for us. The little fellow can move remarkably quickly when he needs to. He apologized profusely and promised an investigation - I rather believed he'd known nothing about the attack. I thanked him and told him I would await his findings in a safe place. I ordered the ferry to gather its crew and disembark, and sent a message to the castle on Lucca's televoice device once we were at sea."

"Hmph," the Chancellor said. "The Mayor was obviously lying. How else would he have found you so quickly?"

"I know him fairly well by now, and he seemed to be telling the truth," Melchior said.

"If the attack had succeeded," General Taron said, "we wouldn't have known what happened for some time, especially if the ferries were stopped. It would certainly have been a good precursor to a surprise assault on Truce or Porre, with no one to see them preparing."

"Well, I hate to say it," Mistress Lucca said, "but these days the only human in the world who can cast fire magic is me." The ambassador harrumphed. "_I _certainly didn't do it," Mistress Lucca went on, "so it had to have been a Mystic."

"I wouldn't jump to conclusions," Melchior said. "There is much about the world we don't know."

"Besides," General Taron said, "it might have been a Mystic that was acting without the Mayor's orders. Mistress Lucca, how many Mystics would you say are capable of casting Fire 2?"

"Actually. . . until tonight, I'd have said 'none.' It's not easy magic, and the Mystics aren't what they used to be. It's not impossible, but I would have thought if someone else could cast it I'd have known about them."

"Certainly it would be easier for a Mystic than a human," the Chancellor said.

"We can't just sit and hope for the best," the Queen said. The King said something, but once again Kurt couldn't hear it. His voice too deep to carry well through the wall.

"Yes, Your Majesty," the General said. "I'll alert my staff at once. They should be already awake. With your permission, Majesty, Majesty, counselors." Kurt and Zeo ducked as the General left the room.

"The rest of us have preparations to make, too," Mistress Lucca said, sounding grim. "I should get Gato Mark III out of storage, and dust off the Wonder Shot." Kurt blinked. He'd helped build the Gato III, but he'd never heard of any Wonder Shot. Some kind of weapon, presumably.

The rest of the council muttered agreement, and started filing out of the room. The boys ducked completely behind the weapons chests until they were gone.

"Wow," Kurt said. "If there's a war, I wonder if they'll let us fight?"

"Not me," Zeo sighed. "They don't let me do _anything._ You might get to help work some battle machine, but I'll be stuck in the castle. And speaking of overprotective parents, you need to help me get back to my room before they check on me."

"No way, Zeo! I'm not climbing up that tower again. I nearly died last time."

"Oh, come on. You don't have to go all the way, just help me out. Got anything useful in that bag?"

"Well, I _do_ have the mini-grapple for my multigun, but. . ."

"No, the gun's too loud," Zeo said, "but could I just use the grapple?"

Kurt sighed. "Fine. But I'm not putting one foot on that tower."

"Whatever you say," Zeo grinned. "Let's go."

-o-

Zeo sprinted up a narrow staircase. "C'mon, Kurt, hurry up."

"That was the third successive flight of stairs, you know," Kurt said, jogging up the last few steps.

"So?" Zeo opened the small window high in the far wall and started wriggling through. He spoke quietly, so the sound wouldn't carry to the guards on the walls. The castle was starting to get noisy, as Taron put the troops on alert, but they'd still hear if he and Kurt were loud enough. "I can just _feel_ my mom thinking, 'I should go check on Zeo, he seemed upset.'" He reached up, grabbed the edge of the roof and pulled himself onto it.

"Is that a quote?" Kurt asked, as he started climbing out after.

Zeo held down a hand for him. "Yeah. She said it while I was spying on her, and I knew there was no way I could get back there first." He pulled, and Kurt rolled onto the roof. "That one got me grounded for…" Zeo looked up, and saw a figure in a white robe standing on the roof, right above the center of the throne room. He snapped his mouth shut and dove to his belly next to Kurt.

"What…"

"Sh!" Zeo pointed. The figure looked like a man, judging by size, but the robe concealed his features completely. He was looking away from the boys, studying the northwest tower. "It's probably a Mystic spy," Zeo whispered in Kurt's ear. "It looks like he's trying to break into Mom and Dad's room; there's secret stuff in there."

"Should we shout for the guards?"

Zeo shook his head. "He'll get to us before they do. They would have sent someone dangerous. We'll have to sneak up on him."

"There's a hole in that logic," Kurt muttered. Suddenly the intruder looked around, as if he sensed the boys' presence. They froze. The stranger shook his head, as though dismissing a brief fancy, and started moving quietly toward the tower.

"Grapple," Zeo whispered. Kurt pulled it out and gave it to him. "Load your gun, but don't shoot until you're sure you'll hit." Kurt nodded. Zeo took off toward the tower, moving as fast as he could without making noise.

The intruder was apparently used to breaking in to places, because he found the best route up the tower - Zeo's route - with almost no hesitation. He climbed onto a crenellation, jumped to the arrow slit, and pulled himself up the arrow slit to the gargoyle. As the intruder reached the ledge, Zeo (hanging from the arrow slit) realized he'd left his window open and a rope hanging from it. He nearly cursed out loud. Well, maybe the guy would miss the jump and make himself a courtyard pancake.

No such luck. As Zeo was scaling the gargoyle, he saw the white robe fly out from the wall, ghostlike, and catch the rope like a pro. He even had gloves. Zeo edged along the wall as fast as he could, fumbling Kurt's grapple from his pocket.

"Hey," came a voice from the wall. "Is that the Prince?"

"Huh? No! Sound the alarm! Intruder in the King's tower!" Zeo snorted. It served the guy right for going sneaking in white.

Once he was around the tower, Zeo studied the grapple. He thought he remembered seeing Kurt use this before. Folded, it looked like a short metal rod attached to a reel of thin, strong wire. Zeo gave it a yank, and the tube folded out into a three-pronged grappling hook. He found the switch on the reel that would let the cord play out.

As soon as the intruder was off the rope, Zeo threw the grapple. It spun around the rope a few times and caught a tooth on the fiber. Zeo flipped the switch and let it reel in. The rope came right to him. He swung out and started climbing. Above him, he heard snapping wood - the thief had forced his parents' door. There went the chance of sneaking up while he was busy picking the lock. Zeo tried to climb faster. He was past the overhang, now - with a wall to push off of he'd go faster.

"Zeo," Kurt shouted, "there's another one!" Zeo looked back. He couldn't see - wait - there might be someone, robed in black. . . waving his arms? Several things then happened at once. There was a crack like thunder as Kurt's gun went off, but the buckshot ricocheted off the man's back, leaving only a small wound in the side of his leg. There was a crash like glass breaking up in the tower. There was an ominous hum as the black-robed man pointed upward, and Zeo _felt_ the magic like a hole in reality.

From his sword training, Zeo had learned that if you practice something often enough, you can do it without thinking even under the worst kind of stress. It applied to climbing, too. Zeo kicked off the wall, slid down the rope, and swung in beneath the overhang. He went fast enough that he was already flying toward the tower wall when the wave of destruction reached his bed, and the rope came loose.

Zeo hit the ledge with his gut, not his feet. The wind was knocked out of him, and he started to fall. Somehow, he managed to get four fingers of his right hand around the ledge and hang that way. He looked up. A. . . thing, a _void_, something darker than the night was exploding through the tower. As Zeo watched, the outer walls blew away, and the entire top of the tower was obliterated. He thought he saw the magic spin there a moment longer, a sharp-cornered blackness blocking the stars, before it vanished. "Holy crap." Had Mom or Dad been up there? They should have been going around giving orders, but what if they _had_ gone up to check on him?

Zeo could worry about his parents later; now he was hanging by one hand over a fatal drop. He reached up with his left hand, and a chunk of broken masonry crashed down on the ledge, right where he'd been about to put it. Zeo flinched away, but two splinters of stone cut his hand, and one struck his face less than half an inch from his left eye. A larger piece knocked his leg as it fell, making him swing alarmingly.

When Zeo looked back up, the ledge was broken off almost right next to his hand. He tried to grab the edge with his other hand, and the stone he grabbed crumbled away into gravel. Zeo couldn't pull himself up one handed, and the other hand had nowhere to grip.

Something appeared in front of him, grabbing: a strange gauntlet of bronze and some light-colored metal. Zeo blinked. "Give me your hand, Zeo, hurry!" Hearing Kurt's voice, Zeo grabbed the thing. It closed on his hand, with a strength that had to come from the gauntlet; Kurt's grip wasn't that strong. The wrist of the thing creaked and groaned as Kurt pulled him up. "You're the luckiest boy alive," Kurt breathed. "Never do that again."

"I wasn't going to," Zeo said. He looked down onto the roof. He'd heard things, but he'd been too busy to pay attention. The two intruders were fighting _each other_. The one in white held a katana whose blade shimmered through every color like an opal, even by torchlight. The scabbard was in his other hand; he didn't seem to have a belt for it. The one in black was holding the other off with his dark magic. The stone of the roof was already marked by the blasts.

"The white one came down the other side of the tower, so fast I thought he fell," Kurt said.

"Well, yeah," Zeo muttered, "if you can go out _Dad's_ window, it's easy." He peered down at the fight. "Wait, that's Rainbow!"

"Which one?"

"No, the sword. That's Dad's katana. Thief!" he yelled down. The two fighters didn't look up. "We need to get down there."

"Zeo! You can't just run into the middle of that. Wait for the guards."

"They can't get up here in time. Go, Kurt, get out of the way." Kurt sighed but he started moving. He wasn't fast enough for Zeo. While he was waiting for Kurt to get clear of the arrow slit, he saw an explosion of black magic knock two holes in the weakened roof. There were crashes and screams from the throne room as the masonry fell. Mom and Dad probably _were_ in the throne room.

He heard Kurt drop, and immediately started climbing after. When he was down and could look again, the sword-thief had forced the magician back away from the throne room. Zeo sprinted after, keeping well wide of the holes. The thief was close enough to take swings at his opponent, now, but the black-robed man just flowed out of the way, moving like a ghost in the darkness. Finally, when it seemed he would be struck, he drew a red knife from his robes, and parried Rainbow. The world seemed to ripple out from where the blades met, and lightning arced to the nearby stone.

"You fool!" the man in white said, staring at the knife. "What have you done?"

The man in black laughed, cast a spell, and sunk through the stone in the form of a shadow. Zeo froze, stunned.

The man in white barely hesitated. He sheathed Rainbow and pulled a lasso from under his cloak. Sprinting toward the edge of the roof, he tossed the loop of rope over a handy crenellation on the edge. Zeo stared, realizing what he planned. "No way. . ."

The thief reached the edge and took a flying leap into space. When the slack in the rope ran out, he stopped in midair and swung back toward the wall - except there wasn't precisely a wall there. Rainbow flashed. The forty-foot-high stained glass window depicting Justice and his scales shattered away from the slice, and the white-cloaked thief flew through the ten-foot hole into the courtroom.

"Get back here, you rotten thief!" Zeo yelled. It was his turn to make use of a rope left behind. He grabbed it and started climbing down the wall, and then down the intact part of the window. When he reached the hole he used his kick-off-and-slide trick, and ended up below the hole, inside the room. He slid to the floor.

Glass crunched under Zeo's boots. He reached down and picked up a yard-long piece of wrought-iron, slightly curved. It had probably been the edge of Justice's shoulder. It wasn't Rainbow by a long shot, but it would have to do.

Zeo vaulted over the arm of the judge's bench and landed on the seat. In the center of the room, the two intruders were fighting, lightning flashing whenever Rainbow met the red knife. "Stop!" Zeo yelled, summoning memories of his father's rarely used Royal Command Voice. Almost to his surprise, they stopped. "You," he said, leveling the metal rod at the one in white, "are a thief. For the honor of Guardia I will take my father's sword back if I must pry it from your dead hands."

The hood of that white cloak turned toward Zeo, then to the black cloak, and back to Zeo. He pointed at himself incredulously, as if to say, _me?_

"That one will pay for attacking my home and endangering my people and my family," Zeo said, "but first _I need my sword."_

"This ends now." The voice came from the depths of the black robe. The wizard pointed at Zeo, and dark arcane symbols spun around his arm.

The thief moved, so fast he seemed to blur, and Rainbow spun like moonlight on a mirror. The red knife came up, and the world rippled as the weapons clashed twice, with almost no pause between them. The thief skidded to a stop. Wet stains appeared on the black cloth from three _more_ strikes, in the shape of three-fifths of a star. "I'm your opponent," the thief said hoarsely. Either he'd taken a throat injury once and it hadn't healed well, or he was disguising his voice.

"Zeo!" came a shout from out the window. "Slow down!" Then Kurt looked in through the hole in the glass, and groaned.

"Cover me!" Zeo shouted, and took a flying overhand leap at the thief. He swung the bar straight down at the man's head. Rainbow came up to meet it, deflecting the strike from cracking his skull, and shaving a neat slice of iron off of most of its length. The bar glanced of the thief's shoulder. Zeo landed behind him and rolled to his feet, snapping the bar into low guard. The balance was actually better now, with that slice taken out.

Kurt's multigun cracked from the window. Blood spurted from the mage's hand, interrupting the spell he'd been casting. "Zeo, get _out_ of there!" Zeo ignored him and charged.

After three parried swings, he thought he had the thief's measure. The guy was fast, and of course his weapon was much better, but there was a hesitation in his movements - a fatal flaw in a swordsman. Zeo attempted a disarm. Rainbow met the attack, all hesitation suddenly gone, and the iron rod was twisted out of Zeo's hands. The thief swung Rainbow's _sheath_, hard enough to knock the wind out of Zeo and throw him back twenty feet on a wave of air. He skidded into the wall, and saw the thief spin and raise Rainbow against an explosion of black magic. The two strangers resumed their duel, though blood was seeping through the black robe and the white cloak was smoldering.

Kurt knelt down beside Zeo. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine," Zeo gasped, "it's the room that's spinning."

"Look at that sword work, that's incredible." Kurt glanced from Zeo to the thief. "Could that be your father?"

"If Dad wanted Rainbow, he'd have gone up the _inside_ of the tower." Zeo spotted the iron bar, and crawled toward it.

"Stupid heroic princes," Kurt muttered, reloading the multigun. "Go for the limbs," he called, "they've got body armor." Zeo grabbed his improvised weapon and staggered to his feet. As he started to charge, Kurt fired into the melee, not caring which one he hit.

This was no buckshot, but a single heavy slug with a double charge of powder. Kurt's gauntlet groaned as the springs absorbed the recoil. The noise was incredible, so there seemed to be no sound when the mage's knife hand shattered, or when the red knife itself broke in two.

The next thing Zeo heard was his own scream. He tumbled to the ground in mid-charge. A foot-long shard of the red knife - half of the thing, it looked like - was embedded in his left knee. After that, he heard Leene's bell ring sweetly in the distance, beginning to stroke midnight.

"Zeo!" Kurt shouted. Leene's bell rang; stroke number two.

The mage reached down with his undamaged hand and grabbed the other half of the red knife where he'd dropped it. Three. The thief brought Rainbow to high guard and charged. Four. The mage began waving his arms, and was surrounded head to foot with spinning balls of black magic as he cast. Zeo thought it was the spell that had destroyed the tower. Five. Rainbow spun like moonlight on a mirror, and the mage's bloody hand pointed.

The sixth stroke of Leene's bell was lost in the sound of the universe starting to tear. The sound was a whining buzz that was somehow much louder than it sounded. Seven. The mage and the thief landed on opposite sides of the room. They immediately started climbing to their feet to fight again. Eight. Zeo watched what was left of poor Justice ripple, as though through a heat haze. But it wasn't a heat haze, because Zeo could feel the rippling in his guts.

Nine. The hole in the universe opened up, an enormous sphere rippling blue and black. Zeo felt himself start to slide toward it. Ten. Kurt grabbed his arm with the gauntlet, trying to pull him back, but he was pulled off his feet. The intruders were being pulled in, too, plucked off the ground in mid-charge, up and in. Eleven. The four of them passed through the edge of the hole, and Zeo saw the thief and the mage twist away in directions he hadn't known existed. The gauntlet's grip held, though, and Kurt stayed with him.

The last stroke of midnight was cut off as the hole closed.


	2. The Frozen Land

The Frozen Land

11500 BC, alpha timeline

-o-

The blue and black swirls abruptly vanished, and Kurt landed face first in the snow. Yelling, he scrambled to his feet, trying to get his face and hands out of the stuff before they froze solid. Unfortunately, the air wasn't much better, especially not with the howling wind ripping the heat away from his skin. Everything was white - the ground was covered in snow, and the sky with flat white clouds.

Zeo groaned. Apparently he couldn't stand up, which made sense, since Kurt could see the foot-long shard of red stone sticking out of his knee. The snow under Zeo's leg was stained red. Kurt pulled a thin tarp out of his bag and spread it on the ground.

"Where are we?" Zeo asked.

"I don't know," Kurt said. "Not Guardia castle." He grabbed under Zeo's arms and pulled him onto the tarp. It wasn't much, but at least he wouldn't be lying in the snow. Hypothermia and frostbite were looking like real dangers.

"Maybe if you get this thing out of my leg, I'll be able to walk."

Kurt knelt down and studied the wound. "It's wedged in the bone. Right in the joint. I'm not a doctor, Zeo. If I pull it out I think it's more likely you'll never walk again."

"Well, that kinda sucks," Zeo panted. "We should find a doctor, then." He was still holding on to that stupid piece of iron, like it was good for something besides making his hands colder.

"Yeah." Kurt stood and scanned the horizon. The wind picked up the powdery snow like dust and threw it in his face. "Uh, I don't see anything. I guess we'll just have to pick a direction at random."

"I hear something," Zeo said. "Someone crying, like a kid."

"I don't hear anything, just the wind." Zeo was probably going into shock, or something. Did cold contribute to shock? Blood loss definitely did. Maybe if Kurt wrapped a bandage around the knife, he could slow the bleeding down? He knew how to wrap a bandage, at least. He fumbled in his bag.

"I'm sure I hear it." Zeo looked around and pointed. "It's that way."

"I guess it's as good a direction as any other," Kurt said, wrapping the bandage around Zeo's knee. He tied it tight. "I guess I'll just drag the tarp." He wasn't sure whether his metal gauntlet was keeping his hand warm or sucking the cold out faster, but at least his hand wouldn't get tired. He grabbed the edge of the tarp and started walking the way Zeo had pointed.

"Where is this?" Zeo said. "Where does it get this cold in May?"

"The south," Kurt answered. He winced at a gust of wind. "Really far south." Suddenly he remembered the stories Mistress Lucca had told him. "Or. . . hey, Zeo, you don't think. . ."

There was a pause. "Nah," they said together.

"Mom said the gates all vanished," Zeo said. "And anyway, there never was one in the castle."

"One in the forest and one in Leene Square," Kurt recited. "I remember. Oof. Apparently there are hills. I couldn't really see, 'cause everything was all white."

"Is that good or bad?"

"Well, it means I wasn't seeing as far as I thought, so maybe there's some shelter close, which is good. But it also means I have to haul your heavy butt up a hill, which is bad."

"Well, keep going, that crying is getting closer. The kid won't be alone out here." Kurt, who still couldn't hear any crying, didn't answer. "At least the wind isn't so cold anymore."

"What are you talking about? It's worse, if anything." Suddenly Kurt realized what that meant. "Zeo, try to. . . wrap the tarp around you or something, keep the wind off. You're freezing to death."

"That's not good," Zeo muttered vaguely. Kurt felt the tarp shifing. "Doesn't feel any different."

Kurt reached the top of the hill. On the slope below, he saw the first bit of non-white color since they'd gotten here. On a patch of hard earth, swept clean of snow by the wind, was a tree, and at its foot was some sort of big blue ball. Curious, and eager for even the slightest shelter, Kurt hurried toward it.

The tree looked like genus _Ficus_, though of course it couldn't really be a fig tree in this climate. As for the blue ball, it turned out to be a creature, with weirdly thin arms and legs, a tuft of green hair on top, and a face right on its round body. It was fast asleep. "Hello?" Kurt called as he approached. Maybe it was intelligent, like a Mystic, and would help them. "Excuse me? We need shelter!" The thing kept on snoring. "Hey! Wake up!"

Kurt walked right up to the thing, and it didn't wake. "Maybe its in some kind of hibernation." He grabbed it by the - not shoulder - spot above the arm, and shook. It didn't move. Its body, though, was almost painfully warm to Kurt's icy hand. He promptly hauled the tarp up next to it and shoved Zeo into the crack between the thing and the tree.

"Ooh," Zeo said. "I think I'm freezing to death again, Kurt."

"That's actual warmth, stupid." Kurt shoved his gauntlet in his bag and curled in on Zeo's other side. He pulled the tarp around them to stop the wind.

"Aggh! Watch the knee!"

"Sorry. Try to get in closer to the thing, we need the warmth. And wiggle your toes," he added, remembering something.

"Why?"

"So they don't freeze and fall off." That killed the conversation rather quickly. "Zeo?" Kurt said after a few minutes. "Are you conscious?"

"Yeah. I'm not gonna fall asleep too easy with my knee like this."

"Just checking."

"What are we going to do, Kurt?"

Freeze to death when the sun went down. But Kurt didn't say it. If Zeo was asking what they would do instead of proclaiming it, he was in rough shape. "Maybe the wind will die down, and we'll be able to go look for someplace better. Or something." They were managing all right here, for the moment. Maybe something _would_ happen.

Something shook Kurt's shoulder. Time must have passed - he must have been drowsing. He could have frozen to death like that. He rolled onto his back, opened his eyes. He saw a girl.

A young woman, really. She looked about eighteen. Dark hair, dark eyes, delicate features and rough skin. She was wrapped in white fur, and carried a flint-tipped spear on her back. "I thought you were dead," she said. "The spirits are with you."

"Is that what I hear?" Zeo muttered. "I thought it was a little boy. Or the wind." He rolled away from the blue thing, wincing at his stiff leg. "Who're you?"

"I am called Fina. Who are you, out on the snow plains dressed like that? You might as well be naked."

"I'm Zeo, he's Kurt. We didn't mean to come here, we got lost."

"You're lucky you found this place. The women often come here, to leave an offering of food for the Nu. That is why I found you."

"The what?" Kurt asked.

"This, that you sleep against. It is an ancient spirit called the Nu, and it has slept here as long as I can remember. I think animals eat the offerings, because the Nu never wakes, but I leave them anyway. Hold still." She put a hand on Kurt's chest, and with the other, shook a rattle of dried seeds next to his ear. The hand on his chest glowed white, like snow glare, and Kurt felt warmth wash through him. When it reached his feet, it burned.

"Aagh!"

"Welcome the pain," Fina said. "It means your feet will stay with your legs, rather than your boots." She reached over him to Zeo and repeated the process. The prince winced but didn't cry out. "I cannot treat your wounded leg here. We will have to carry you back to the village."

"Right," Zeo said, sounding better but still shaky. "At least I won't be getting dragged anymore."

Kurt climbed to his feet. All his toes seemed to be working. "Thanks for your help," he said.

"All the people are as one," she answered simply. "But that does not mean I will stand here and freeze to death for you. We must hurry. It is going to snow."

"Right. I'll get this end. . ."

Fina took off her fur scarf. "Take this, first, so you do not collapse on the way." Kurt wrapped the thing around his neck and ears. Body heat was lost quickest through the head. Fina took off her cape and laid it over Zeo. She was still mostly covered in white furs. "Lift him. The village is south of here." They picked Zeo up and started walking. Kurt noticed that Fina had indeed left a pair of what he guessed were edible roots for the Nu.

"Fina," Zeo said, "do you know how we could get back to Guardia?"

"I don't know that place," Fina said. "Which tribe is closest to it?"

Zeo blinked. It had clearly never occurred to him that someone might not have _heard_ of Guardia. Kurt spoke up. "Guardia is the name of the people, as well as the place."

"Then I can't help you. I know the Tribe of the White Bear, and the Tribe of the Grey Seal to the south and east, and the Tribe of the Black Albatross that is gone over the sea. In my learning, these are all the people in all the world."

"I think Guardia is far to the north of here," Kurt offered. "Probably across an ocean."

"Over the sea? And you can't be from the Albatross; they went west. I never thought there might be people _already_over the sea. Is that why you have such strange garments? I don't think they were ever the skin of an animal."

"Yes, that's right," Kurt said, not really paying attention. If they'd never heard of Guardia, there probably wasn't anyone on the island - continent? - but these Tribes. Though apparently they had the tech base for an ocean-going ship, or thought they did. Maybe he and Zeo could get home that way.

"You will have to teach me the ways of your tools," Fina said. "They seem better than ours."

"Huh? Oh. Sure, what I can," Kurt said. If Fina was impressed by cloth, chemistry and electronics wouldn't be going concerns around here for quite a while. Judging by that spear, they didn't even have _bronze!_

Fina grinned at him suddenly. "I didn't think to find all the secrets of eternity in a half-frozen pair of boys. Hurry up, Kurt, the snow is coming." Kurt thought about correcting the misunderstanding, but decided it wasn't worth it. He shut his mouth and tried to move faster.

-o-

Zeo wasn't asleep. He _did_ know how stupid it was to fall asleep outside in bad weather. Most people forgot, but Guardia Castle was in the foothills of a minor but northerly mountain range. And he hadn't been lying about the pain keeping him awake. It was just easier not to talk. To himself, he was willing to admit that his knee hurt a lot. A whole lot.

Just when he moved, mostly. Or when Kurt moved, or, now, when Fina moved. Or when Zeo breathed. Or when he thought about breathing.

So it was easier to not talk, and keep his eyes shut, and concentrate on ignoring the pain. He only opened his eyes when he felt a particularly big jolt. "Sorry," Kurt muttered. He must have winced. "We're here."

They were in some dim shack somewhere. The place smelled like mud, only worse. Apparently they used the same stuff to burn and build with, and it reeked. It was warm, though, which was all Zeo really cared about.

He was lying on a pile of furs, flat and comfortable. There were various herb packets and spiritual-looking things hanging from the ceiling, and Fina was puttering around with more in the corner. Kurt was standing by the foot of the pallet, fidgeting. A green-haired kid watched solemnly from the doorway.

Fina turned around with a rattle - a different one, more elaborate. She started shaking it in a simple rhythm - shake SHAKE, shake; shake SHAKE, shake. "Kurt," she said, "can you keep this rhythm?"

"Uh…"

"I can," Zeo said. "Mom and Dad made me take music lessons. He can do three chords on an organ and I found her old flute bent in half in an attic, but _I_have to play violin…" He was babbling. He clicked his teeth shut.

"That would be better, actually," Fina said. She handed him the rattle, and he picked up the rhythm easily. It made a pretty good distraction. That kid was still watching, his eyes big.

"What's the rattle for?" Kurt asked.

"To distract the festering spirits from the blood and pain," Fina answered. She was wrapping a leather strap with beaded tassels on the ends around the knife shard.

"What's that for?" Kurt asked.

"So I can pull the thing out without cutting my hand," she said, in the same smooth tone. Kurt blinked. "The beads are because everything in a healing ceremony must be blessed."

"Calm down, Kurt, it's magic," Zeo said. "You've seen magic before."

Fina actually blushed at that. "It isn't true magic. It's something like, but I can't seem to cross the line. Something is missing." She laid her hands on either side of Zeo's knee, and they started that snow-glare glow again.

"I don't think Mom was using her real spells, either," Zeo said absently. The rattling, and the warmth from Fina's hands, and the smell of the place all sort of filled his head. "But she would glow, when I ran to her with a scraped knee or whatever. Just like that. She was so pretty."

The glowing stopped. "Bite down on this," Fina said, putting another leather strip in his mouth. Zeo did. Fina paused, and looked at him strangely. "Your mother has… real spells, then?" Zeo nodded. "I would like to meet her," she said. "Very much." She shook herself. "It is time. Bite down on the leather, and keep the rhythm as well as you can." Kurt was fidgeting rather badly, now, and the boy in the doorway was biting the knuckle of his thumb nervously.

Zeo closed his eyes and breathed deeply through his nose. He concentrated on the rattle, on keeping that rhythm. Shake SHAKE, shake. Shake SHAKE, shake. Fina put one hand on his leg and the other on the knife shard. Zeo could feel the warmth from one and the jolt of pain from the other. Then she pulled. It was surprisingly fast. By the time Zeo realized he was screaming through his clenched teeth, the thing was out.

"Strange, I thought it would bind in the bone," Fina murmured, but she'd already handed the shard to Kurt (he held it like it was a snake) and started bandaging Zeo's leg.

"Should you splint it?" Kurt asked.

"No. I have found that if an injury to the bones of a joint is splinted, the joint will not bend anymore when it heals."

Zeo managed to spit the leather out, gasping. It felt like he'd nearly bitten a chunk off. Fina had done her not-magic, the thing that was like Mom's Aura, before, during, and now after pulling the knife out, but obviously her version did nothing at all for pain. It was better now than before, but the pain of the pull itself had him still sweating. Fina took her rattle back and started pulling furs over him. "You need warmth and sleep, now, Zeo. Rest." She walked out, pulling Kurt behind her. The kid stayed, in fact he came in and sat on the floor next to Zeo, still watching him. For some reason, Zeo didn't think this was strange. He closed his eyes and fell asleep.


	3. White Hands

White-Hands

11500 BC, alpha timeline

-o-

Fina handed Kurt an extra fur as they left the medicine hut, a big brown skin probably meant for a blanket. "Keep the scarf too, for now," she said. "You can get your own later."

Seeing White Bear village had been a bit of a shock for Kurt. They used peat as both building material and fuel, and only had flint and bone for tools. There were spears like Fina's with wooden hafts, but apparently the wood was hard to get, because nothing else was made of it. He'd known from talking to Fina that he wouldn't see cloth, but he was surprised at the other things that were missing - wheels, for example, and pottery. What was more, there were less than two hundred people here, and Fina said this was the whole tribe, one of only three, and she'd never heard of other people in the world. Kurt hadn't known people still lived like this. The wild suspicion he and Zeo had dismissed out on the plains was tickling the back of his head and refusing to go away.

"What troubles you?" Fina asked.

Kurt could hardly say her home was a stinking hovel. "It's very different here," he said diplomatically. His hands curled, itching to build something, to _fix_ this.

She nodded. "This is the meeting hut," she said. "You should meet the Chief." This hut was larger than the others, and there were several people inside, mostly skinny, solemn little kids. In the center was a big pile of smoldering peat, keeping the large space warm. There was a small hole in the ceiling to let the smoke out, but a good deal of it stayed in. Everyone was still wrapped in furs in here; it was only warm inside compared to outside.

Kurt noticed some tall, narrow skins hanging on the walls. He studied one near the door. There were marks on it, faded pictures, and… writing? He wiped his glasses and looked again. Definitely writing. The script was pretty strange, and it had faded badly, but he could make it out. "'The three…'" He shook his head. The next mark was a pictogram, and he didn't know what it meant.

"You can read?" Fina said. "It is a rare skill."

"Not where I come from," Kurt said, "though our letters are pretty different. Most people wouldn't be able to read this."

"I read that mark as 'Wise Men,'" Fina said. "I think it is a lost word that was a title long ago."

"'The three Wise Men,'" Kurt read, "'who had all knowledge, and guided the people.' This is a history! The pictures seem to tell half of it, but a real written history!"

Fina nodded. "It is, and the tale it tells is very old, from before the tribes." Kurt walked along the wall, looking at each skin. There were several that seemed about as old as the first, then they seemed to taper off. Then suddenly he came across one that was barely faded at all.

"Hey, a new one. 'The Black Albatross go over the sea.'" There were three more unfaded skins next to it. "A regular literary renaissance."

"These are my work. I learned some of the writing from the few who remembered it, and figured out the rest."

"A waste of time and good skins," someone said. Kurt and Fina turned. It was a very old man (which, around here, probably meant he was over fifty.) Like Fina, he dressed entirely in white fur, though he had more than her, piled over him so he looked fat.

"Knowledge is valuable," Fina said defensively. "Who was it that told the tribe what the comet was, that it meant more monsters but no other danger, that making offerings would not cause it to go away? It was not you, Adan-Chief."

"You speak of that too often," the Chief said. "You, ice-eyes. I am Adan Grey-Hill, White Bear Chief."

_Ice-eyes_ meant him, Kurt realized. The man was talking about his glasses. "Uh, I'm Kurt Liedermark."

"A strange name. Why are you here, Kurt-Stranger?"

"My friend and I were lost in the snow fields. Fina helped me."

The chief folded his arms over his impressive pile of furs. "Why should you have our skins, our food? It is a hard winter."

Fina's eyes narrowed. "All the people are as one, Adan-Chief," she said angrily. "That has been the way of the tribes since the sky fell."

"It is a foolish way. We do not have enough to give to strangers who are too stupid to find their way home."

"It is because of that way that we survived!" Fina said. "It is written in a story-skin that. . ."

"You concern yourself too much with what is written," Chief Adan growled. "You concern yourself too much with the past. I think you wish to revive the Sky-Demons, Fina White-Hands. Fina-Witch." A nervous murmuring filled the hut. Kurt realized everyone was listening in. Fina looked around too, and clenched her fists. "I do not think the White Bear tribe needs your words," the chief finished.

"Then I will go back to the medicine hut," Fina hissed. "I used many supplies to heal your niece's cough, Adan-Chief, and I need to make more. Come, Kurt." She all but dragged him out of the hut.

"Whoa," Kurt said. "That was intense."

"Much of what he said was for the ears listening in, so they would not listen to me in council. But Adan Grey-Hill does not like me. I would be shaman, except he refused to call me Fina-Shaman, and soon the whole tribe stopped." She sighed, and grabbed Kurt's shoulder. "I only mentioned the medicine hut to anger Adan-Chief. Zeo should sleep now. My hut will do." Kurt nodded and followed her. It was starting to snow; one big flake landed on Kurt's hand and melted.

"The things he called you," Kurt said, awkwardly avoiding the word "witch." "Is it because you want to learn magic?"

"You worked that out?" Fina dropped her eyes. "I suppose it wasn't hard. Yes, I have been trying to learn magic. The tribes' life is hard, and I think if I knew magic we would be warmer, better fed. You've seen the beginnings of it, the spirit medicine; that is why I am called White-Hands. It is not true spell-casting, but the people do not know the difference, and they are afraid I am somehow a Sky Demon."

Kurt snorted. "What's that, some old legend?"

"One that also appears in the story-skins," Fina said sternly. Kurt's contempt became embarrassment, and he blushed. "They were a race that lived in castles floating in the sky, and had powerful magic," she explained, as they climbed under the beaded skins that served her hut for a door. "But they were evil. They imprisoned the three Wise Men, and enslaved people to do their work, and left the others to freeze and starve when their magic gave them more than they could ever need." The way Fina said it, withholding their magic was far worse than slavery or wrongful imprisonment. Kurt remembered that creed of hers, _all the people are as one._

"It was colder then, or so the story-skins seem to say," Fina went on. "It snowed for most of the year, perhaps all. The people only survived because of secret help from the Wise Men. So it was, until the sky fell. All the castles of the Sky Demons broke and burned and fell into the sea, and the people were free." Fina shrugged. Kurt blinked, startled at how he'd been drawn in to even that short story. "There is a great tale, an epic, which tells all that, but I think it has changed with the years. I have told you the parts that appear in the story-skins."

"It's a good story," Kurt said, "but. . ." He stopped. People with evil magic living in castles in the sky while those without huddled through an ice age below? "Come to think of it, I've heard that story before. I think. . ." He couldn't actually say it. After all, he still wasn't sure, and how could he claim to have traveled nearly thirteen thousand years back in time unless he was sure?

"You think our peoples remember the same events?" Fina nodded. "That makes sense. People far from each other would have seen the sky falling."

"I, uh, I'd like to hear the long version of the story. The one your people passed down."

Fina grinned at him. "I'd like to hear the making of your strange tools. I know you don't know everything, but I think what you do know would help the tribe as much as magic would."

Kurt hesitated. It wasn't that he didn't know everything - from these people's perspective, he did - but that most of the knowledge wouldn't do any good. He could tell them how to make gunpowder, but what use would it be without metal to make a gun with? And if he really was in the past, boosting the tribes' technology would change history, which might not be a good idea.

But this place was pitiful. He knew how to make a loom, a potter's wheel, a plow, and teach the White Bear tribe to make them, too, if he could get some wood. Like Fina said, even that much would be a huge help. Maybe then those kids in the meeting hut would be laughing next winter, instead of sitting around hungry.

"Okay, let's start simple. Do you know what a 'wheel' is?"

-o-

Zeo woke up. The peat stink, the rough furs, and the sore knee were just as they'd been when he'd dropped off. He heard someone sniffling in the corner. He looked up drowsily. It was the green-haired kid, the one who'd watched the healing ritual. "What's wrong, kid?" he asked.

"I'm lonely," the boy muttered. "I miss my big brother."

"Aww. Well, you can hang around here for a while. It's not like I have anywhere to go." Zeo gestured at his bad leg. He noticed the red stone knife sitting on a wooden box next to the boy. Fina or Kurt had wiped most of his blood off it, but he could still see some dark stains on the polished blade. That bar from the stained glass window was leaning against the wall nearby.

"Okay," the boy said. "I'm glad you didn't freeze to death, then."

"Gee, thanks," Zeo snorted. "Hey, wait, I know your voice. You were the one crying on the snow plains. Kurt thought you were the wind."

A grin lit up the kid's face. "Really? I always wanted to be the wind."

Zeo smiled. "No, I mean he thought I was only imagining you."

"The wind isn't imaginary," the kid giggled. "Humans are so silly."

Zeo realized he wasn't surprised. Kurt and Fina had never seen or heard the boy, even when he'd been standing right in the hut with them. "You're a spirit, aren't you?" That wouldn't have been his first guess back home, he'd have said "Mystic" or something. But lying in Fina's hut, in Fina's world, his mind caught on to Fina's words.

He nodded. "My name's Mune."

"I'm Zeo. Good to meet you."

"Will you help me find my big brother?"

"I'll try, once I can walk again. Do you have any idea where he is?"

Mune shook his head sadly. "He isn't now at all, so I can't tell. It's lonely without him." Zeo shook his head, confused. Then he yawned. "Do you need to sleep again?" Mune asked.

"I won't be able to go right back to sleep. Dunno what else there is to do, though."

"Oh, that's easy," Mune said. He leaned over and blew across Zeo's eyes. He giggled as Zeo blinked, suddenly drowsy. "Nighty-night," he said, as Zeo faded back to sleep.

-o-

"Zeo? Zeo, are you awake?"

Zeo rolled over. "Five more min - ahh!" Turning had jostled his knee. "Okay, I'm up. What do you want, Kurt?" It was dark, except for Kurt's flashlight. The wind howled outside, and there was snow on Kurt's furs.

"I've been talking to Fina, and I figured out where we are. It's… it's not good news." Zeo sat up. Mune was nowhere to be seen. "This is the past, Zeo. It's the tag-end of the last ice age, maybe a few hundred years after Zeal fell."

Several things came together in his head. Magic in Medina, and in Guardia Castle, where no human had had magic for hundreds of years. A knife of red stone. _Mune._ "They were time travelers. The guys who attacked the castle, they were from the past."

"I guess," Kurt said. "One of them didn't use magic, he could be from the future."

Zeo pointed. "That's from the past, for sure."

Kurt looked at the knife, and then did a double take as he realized what it was. "Crap! That's the _Masamune!_Or the pre-Masamune, Melchior's dreamstone knife. That can't be _here!_ It needs to get stuck into the Mammon Machine, five hundred years ago!" He buried his face in his hands. "And I shot it in _half!_"

Zeo licked his lips. All his parents' stories were racing through his head, all the fantastic adventures which he'd loved and envied but never quite believed. "And then it needs to get turned into a sword so it can be used in the Middle Ages. . . this isn't good, Kurt. This could change everything."

"Do - do you feel okay, Zeo?"

"Uh, my knee hurts…"

"But you're still here, you haven't vanished. It means your parents didn't die or anything, trying to storm Magus' castle without Frog and the Masamune." Zeo went white. He hadn't thought of that. "Oh, man," Kurt muttered, "no wonder the thief was so ticked when he saw that thing. He must have recognized it. This. . . would they have ever beaten Lavos without it?"

Zeo slumped back on his bedding. Then he started chuckling. "I promised Mune I'd help him find his big brother."

Kurt stared for several seconds. When he figured it out, he laughed even harder. "Well, we damn well _better!_ And put them back together somehow, and get them where they need to be, and… but how, Zeo? We don't even have a Gate Key. How do we even get home?"

Zeo hesitated. "Dad'll come for us. As soon as he sees the gate in the courtroom he'll get the Gate Key and follow us through."

"I hope so," Kurt said. "With just what's in my satchel, and this place's tech base, I could probably make a Gate Key that would work most of the time - in a year or two. And was there even a gate where we landed?"

"Uh. . . I dunno. I wasn't really looking around."

"I didn't see one. I think I'd have noticed. So maybe there won't be anything for the King to follow us through."

"Don't talk like that. He'll find a way, he always does. That, or we will." Kurt nodded dubiously, and yawned. "You should go to bed; I guess it's late."

"Actually, I think I'm sleeping here," Kurt said. "It's that or Fina's bed."

"I'll trade with you," Zeo offered promptly, wiggling his eyebrows in a way he obviously thought was lascivious.

Kurt whacked him on the top of the head playfully. "Doofus. You can't even _get_ up, much less…" Zeo whacked him back before he could finish. "Then don't start with the dirty jokes, Your Highness. You're no good at it."

"Whatever, peasant. Go to sleep and don't bother me, then."

Kurt slipped into the pile of furs. It was big enough that he could cover himself completely with no danger of jostling Zeo. "Don't call me peasant."

"Don't call me Highness."

Soon they were asleep.


	4. The Witch and the Demons

The Witch and the Demons

11500 BC, alpha timeline

-o-

Fina woke up at daybreak, as usual. After a snowstorm, the women would not go out gathering, as Fina had yesterday. The day would be spent preserving food, repairing tools, or, for Fina, preparing medicines and ritual materials. There were voices outside, sounding louder than usual. They were probably talking about Zeo and Kurt, or the dispute between Fina and Adan-chief.

Speaking of which, Fina would need to check up on Zeo. Despite her precautions, he might still get wound fever. Even a healthy young man could die if a wound that deep became fevered. She put on her skins and put her head out the doorway. There was a large crowd in the commons, mostly young men with Adan-chief in the center. They all immediately stopped talking and stared at her.

Fina quickly picked her spear up from where it was leaning next to the door. Several people in the crowd shrunk back. Heartened, Fina walked casually toward the medicine hut, trudging through the knee-deep snow. She tried to make it look like she only had the spear to steady herself as she pushed along. It almost seemed like it was going to work, but just short of the medicine hut she heard Adan-chief behind her. "Fina-Witch!"

Fina stopped short, and her temper snapped. "Yes, Adan-Fool?"

"Hear how she mocks your chief!" Adan shouted, and Fina realized she'd made a mistake. She turned around slowly. "See how she wears full white, like a leader of the tribe. Did the people name her chief?" The crowd laughed. "Did the people name her hunt leader, or shaman?"

"They did name me shaman. All but you, Adan-_Chief._"

"They do not…"

Fina pointed - not with the spear - at someone in the crowd. "You, Rawl, you called me shaman when I blessed your son's spear. Camyo, when I saved your wife and delivered your new daughter alive, you said 'Thank you, Fina-Shaman,' many times. You were nearly weeping." Camyo had been sobbing and dripping snot, and most of the tribe had seen it, but embarrassing a hunter would do nothing for her.

The crowd looked uncertain, but Adan spoke again. "But the people call you that no longer, Fina. They seem to have decided that you are no longer the shaman."

"You are the one who decided that," Fina said. "But your decision makes no sense. Wounds are being treated, babies delivered, hunts blessed and weather read. Who else but me is doing these things?"

"It is not for what you do not do that the people reject you, but for what you do, Fina-Witch. All know that you perform dark rituals at night, attempting to summon Sky-Demons." That was a double lie - not only did she do no such thing, but probably no one had believed such a thing until Adan thought of it, this morning or last night. "And now they have come!"

Fina blinked. "I don't know what you mean. Was the village attacked in the night? Was someone hurt?"

"Hear her speak as though she knows nothing, when the demons stand in the doorway of her own medicine hut!" Fina turned around. Zeo and Kurt were standing in the doorway, with Zeo leaning on the shorter boy. Zeo had his odd grey club and the knife she'd taken out of him stuck through his belt, as though he was planning to fight. Even Kurt was holding his bag so that he could reach inside easily. Fina guessed he had a knife inside.

"This is foolishness!" Fina said. "Zeo and Kurt are only strangers, from a distant place. There are no Sky Demons any longer."

"You told us - _you_, Fina - that one of the story-skins describes the Sky-Demons as having human shape, youthful, in fine clothes. Did you not say that they did not know the snow?"

This sounded very bad. Apparently, Kurt thought so, too, because Fina heard someone scrambling for something in the hut, moving too fast to be Zeo. "Uh, the skins did seem to say that, but…"

"Would any true member of the White Bear tribe bring Sky-Demons into our huts?"

"I - no, but I did not…"

"Will the White Bear tribe allow this witch and her demons to live amongst us?"

"No!" the crowd shouted. A rock thudded into the side of the medicine hut, and Fina flinched.

"Why is she your enemy?" It was Zeo, leaning against the edge of the hut's doorway. He seemed to be talking to Adan, but the chief didn't have to answer.

"She's a witch!" a hunter shouted.

"Right." The word was an agreement, but Zeo made it sound as though the hunter was a complete fool. "Fina isn't a politician, she doesn't want power except to heal people. All she does is say that 'all the people are one.' Is that the problem?"

"Quiet, demon," a young woman shouted, and she and two others threw stones. Zeo's narrow club blurred from his belt, and there was a resounding clang. The stone he'd struck flew aside; the others hit the hut.

"How does your chief want to divide the people?" Zeo asked, weapon still in hand. "Does he want to reward his friends, deprive his enemies? Does he want to make war?"

Adan flinched, and shouted, "Nonsense! Lies! Be si-"

"Or maybe," Zeo said, drowning him out, "he just wants you to stone out anyone who argues with him." There was a silence.

"Begone, demon!" Adan shouted, red with rage. "Take your lies and your witch and never return!"

"Sure," Zeo said contemptuously, putting his club back in his belt. "Just remember this when Adan sends you to start a war. And don't complain too loud about it." Kurt stepped up behind him and draped a skin from the medicine hut's bedding over his shoulders. Kurt had a skin of his own, and was carrying a package that seemed to contain medicines and other objects he'd grabbed from the hut. He held it out to Fina, and when she hesitated, he shrugged and laid it in the doorway. He put Zeo's arm over his shoulder, and they started to slowly leave the village.

Watching them go alone out into the snow fields, where they would certainly die in their ignorance, Fina's temper broke free again. "Are you all such fools? Are you all so rich and fat that you do not blink at casting out two young and healthy people? You saw Zeo wield his club, can't you imagine how strong he would be with a spear, how much food he could have brought to our fires? Kurt is the student of a great tool-maker, he could have made great things for us, and changed the lives of every tribesman. You superstitious fools!

"I cannot think you really meant to cast out your shaman, when no girl in the tribe has enough knowledge to step into the medicine hut. But if you would say that I am not your shaman, then I will not be. I will go with the two men who have more courage than all the hunters of the White Bear together." She picked up the parcel Kurt had made for her and stomped off after him and Zeo.

She nodded them when she caught up. (They weren't moving very fast, of course, with Kurt half-carrying Zeo.) Zeo smiled at her, and Kurt nodded back. "We're sorry you lost your home," Kurt said politely, "but we could use your help."

"That's why I left," Fina said, glaring over her shoulder at the huts.

"Barbarian idiots," Zeo scoffed. "Might as well have been a democracy, the way he was using the mob. This place needs a king."

"Right," Kurt said dryly, "because that little confrontation would have gone _much_ better if Adan had a private army."

"It certainly would have helped if Fina had one," Zeo said. "It would have helped if she'd been able to argue laws instead of vague traditions."

Fina stared. "What on earth are you two talking about?"

"Just an old argument," Zeo said. "Kurt is a horrible treasonous democrat and I'm going to have to execute him someday." He was obviously joking, but aside from that Fina still didn't understand.

Kurt sighed. "Basically, we're arguing about whether leaders should be the sons of the last leaders, as they are in our country, or whether they should be chosen by the people. Since Zeo _is_ the son of the current leader, he's a little biased."

"It seems a foolish argument," Fina said. "The people choose the old chief's son anyway, most of the time."

"Yeah," Kurt agreed, "if they had an election tomorrow back home, it would be Zeo's father that got voted in, unless it was his mother. We just like to argue about it." The two of them were like a hunting partnership, comfortable and trusting with each other. Fina looked at Zeo, wondering if the two of them were intimate, as hunting partners sometimes were. Then she wondered why she cared.

"I will lead you to the place of the Grey Seal tribe," she said. "Hopefully, their chief is not such a fool."

"That's great," Zeo said. "But first I'd like to see the place where we showed up. Maybe we can get back home."

"Not too likely," Kurt sighed, "but it's worth a shot."

"Once again," Fina began.

"What are we talking about?" Kurt scratched his head. "You'll think we're crazy."

"Nah, she's smart," Zeo said confidently. "Fina, you know how we don't come from here?" She nodded. "Well, that's not quite right. It's more like we don't come from _now._" She blinked. "We're from the future, about twelve or thirteen thousand years from now."

"Spirits protect us," Fina breathed. She had convinced herself the Dark Man had been a dream, or a vision of some spirit. "'Men who dare the span and flow of time.'"

"I guess," Zeo said, "if you want to get poetic about it. So you believe us?" This with a triumphant grin at Kurt.

"Yes," Fina said, "it explains a great deal. Is - I mean, do you know any other time travelers?"

"Sure," Kurt said. "My teacher, Mistress Lucca, and Zeo's parents went on a great adventure when they were teenagers, zooming up and down the timeline and saving the world. We grew up on the stories."

"Plus there's the two who showed up at the castle last night," Zeo added. "A thief in white, who took my father's sword, and a wizard in black who destroyed the royal tower and half the throne room roof. Those two, I'm going to hunt down, if my parents will let me." Fina blinked.

"They won't," Kurt predicted. "If they weren't going to let you fight the Mystics, they certainly won't let you chase down time-traveling magic-using criminals."

"Probably not," Zeo sighed. "Look, there's the tree we slept under." The tree grew, wide and gnarled, from the side of a hill. Fina could see a snowdrift where the Nu slept, covering it completely.

"The place we gated in should be on the other side of the hill, less than a mile from here," Kurt said. "We should be able to get close to it, at least, though finding the exact spot might be tricky."

As it turned out, finding the exact spot wasn't tricky at all. There was a blue and black sphere hanging over the spot, fading from faint to dark and back again. "Yes!" Zeo shouted when it came into view.

"A gate," Kurt said. "It's gotta be a gate. But why wasn't it here yesterday? And why is it fading in and out like that?"

Zeo looked at empty space beside him, as though listening to a short invisible person. "What does that mean?"

Kurt stared at him, clearly thinking him mad, but Fina simply asked, "Do you hear a spirit, Zeo?"

"Yeah. Mune, the spirit of this half of the dreamstone knife. He says the gate is fading in and out because it's a 'maybeso,' whatever that means. We can see it now because he's helping us."

"That's great," Kurt said, "but we still don't have a Gate Key. Does he know a way to open it?"

Zeo listened again. "Use you? What do you - oh." He drew the red knife, with Fina's beaded leather still wrapped around the base for a grip. "Are you sure this'll work?" Zeo listened, and looked utterly confused. "I'm just going to take that as a yes." He turned to Fina. "Thanks for all your help. You saved our lives. If you ever need anything - well, actually, I doubt we'll ever see you again, but…"

"Take me with you," Fina said suddenly. "If you want to repay me, take me with you. All my life, I believed that all the people were as one, but now I am an outcast. I could go to the Grey Seal, but they have their own shaman, they would mistrust me as an outsider. It would be years, maybe, before I was truly welcomed. I would see your home, Kurt, with its many tools, and the work-place of your learned teacher. I would see the people you will lead, Zeo, and especially I would ask your mother to teach me magic." And maybe, she thought but did not say, she would meet a man she had thought she would never see again.

"She wants to learn," Kurt said approvingly. "I say bring her."

"Of course!" Zeo grinned, as though it had never been in question once she asked. "Mom's not the only one who knows magic, either. Dad and Mistress Lucca and Uncle Mechior do, too. They said they couldn't teach us, but maybe since you're so close already they can do something."

"It is a better chance than I'd have any other way," Fina said firmly. "And even without magic it would be worth it."

"It's not like this would be forever," Kurt said. "Mistress Lucca said the gates lasted a full year, last time, much longer than the quest took. We could get the Gate Key and bring you back, if you wanted."

"Then why should I not come?" Fina asked. "I risk almost nothing, and gain much. Open your gate, Zeo."

"With pleasure." He hopped forward.

Kurt motioned for Fina to step back. "Don't stand too close, it may be dangerous. A roughly opened gate can arc electricity." Fina understood not a word after "dangerous," but the first part was clear enough. "Once it opens, we'll have a few seconds to get in. Don't get left behind."

"I won't," Fina said firmly.

"Ready?" Zeo said over his shoulder. At their nod, he fell onto his good knee in the deep snow. He reversed his grip on the knife, holding it overhand, and with both arms drove it straight into the center of the gate. He then slashed the knife back and to the side, as if gutting some great beast. The sphere collapsed to a point and then expanded again, wavering red and black, until it was at least three yards across.

"Red?" Kurt said, sounding confused, but Fina remembered his warning, even if he did not. She was already moving, and Kurt didn't hesitate long behind her. They each grabbed one of Zeo's arms, and then the three of them leapt toward the future.


	5. We're Back?

We're Back?

1016 AD, omega timeline

-o-

The three of them stepped out of the red gate, and found themselves staring at the south wall of the Guardia courtroom, golden light from the window streaming over their shoulders.

Zeo pumped his arm in the air. "Yaha! We're back!"

"I didn't really think that would work," Kurt laughed.

"A wondrous place," Fina said, looking around. "Does this hall have a purpose?"

"It's a courtroom," Kurt said. "When people have a dispute, or someone is accused of a crime, they come here to have the case judged impartially."

The door opened, and a guard looked in. "Hey, how did you kids get in here? Get out or get in the gallery, the trial's about to start."

"Okay," Kurt said, "let's go."

"Actually, let's stay," Zeo said. "If they're trying someone the day after last night's attack, I want to watch."

"I think you want to surprise everyone and make a scene when they ask for witnesses," Kurt grumbled, "but you have a point." They slowly made their way to the staircase up to the gallery in the back of the room.

"Why did they not recognize you, Zeo?" Fina asked. "You are the chief's son, aren't you?"

"I'm in disguise," Zeo said, gesturing to his rough clothes.

"He didn't get a good look," Kurt corrected. "The word for Zeo is 'Prince,' by the way, and his father's the King." They came to the top of the stairs, facing the bench. Justice's stained-glass face stared serenely at them. "Uh-oh."

"They fixed the window," Zeo said. "Shouldn't that have taken weeks?"

"Months," Kurt said. "And that's for a rush job. I think we missed." People were coming into the courtroom, now, filling the gallery. Kurt and Fina helped Zeo to a good seat and sat on either side of him.

"Missed?" Fina said. "You mean, this isn't the exact time you left?"

"It can't be," Kurt said. "That window was definitely broken, Zeo and I both climbed through the hole. That bit of metal Zeo's been waving around is _part_ of the thing." The galleries were almost full, and below them two men walked across the courtroom floor. "The Chancellor's prosecuting," Kurt said. "Either they're trying a noble, or it's a crime against the crown."

"And that's old Pierre defending," Zeo laughed. "He does like the hopeless cases."

"All rise!" a guard called out. They pulled Zeo to his feet. The old judge walked slowly across the room and sat at the bench. The court sat down again.

The gavel banged. "The court will come to order, in the case of the Crown versus Crono."

Zeo leapt to his feet and nearly toppled over the railing when his leg wouldn't support him. "Say _what?_"

The judge banged for order. Kurt pulled Zeo back into his seat. "He has fits," he explained feebly to the curious people around them. He leaned over and whispered in Zeo's ear. "Calm down. We know what year it is now. This has to be 1000, your father's on trial for kidnapping your mother."

"Interesting family," Fina muttered.

"Bring in the prisoner!" Crono walked in, his hands tied behind him, flanked by guards. Zeo stared, eager to see what his father looked like at seventeen. He looked… not very different than he did at thirty-three. He wore a pale yellow tunic that looked like it usually went with a belt, but the belt, and any sword it might have carried, were missing. "The charges are treason, rebellion, and murder of His Majesty's soldiers in the line of duty." Zeo tore his attention away from Crono and looked at the judge. That didn't sound right. "How do you plead?"

Crono lifted his chin defiantly, refusing to answer. "Not guilty," Pierre said hurriedly.

"Something's wrong," Zeo muttered. "This isn't the same trial."

"Yeah." Kurt put a hand on Zeo's shoulder and bent him over. "Keep your head down, and don't talk," he whispered. "I don't think we want anyone recognizing you."

"Is this perhaps your future?" Fina whispered. "Has some new king invented false crimes for your father, as Adan did to me?"

"It's possible," Kurt admitted. Below them, the Chancellor was calling a witness, an army officer.

"Kurt," Zeo whispered. "I don't want to look up. Is anyone in the royal box?"

There was a pause, while Kurt looked. "Yes. Queen Nadia, with her coronet, and. . . another man, with the crown."

Zeo hissed. "What does he look like?"

"Uh, skinny, dark wavy hair, pointy beard. At least forty."

"Earl duFrey? I wouldn't have thought he had the guts. How's Mom?"

Kurt didn't answer. "She is unharmed," Fina said. "Earl duFrey's hand is on hers. She is looking at Crono. There is a secret sadness in her eyes."

There was a long pause, while the army soldier described a red-haired swordsman leading an attack on one of His Majesty's military payroll caravans. "Thank you," Zeo said eventually. "The thief in white probably isn't in this era. I'll have to find Melchior, or Fritz Liedermark." Fina raised an eyebrow, not understanding. "I need a real sword."

"The Crown could present many more witnesses," the Chancellor was saying, "but this alone is enough for five death sentences."

"Does the defense have anything to say?" the judge asked.

"Your Honor," Pierre said, "we have a witness who can prove the defendant was nowhere near his Majesty's pay caravan. I call Taban to the stand."

The Chancellor smiled. "Taban has also been charged with treason. He is in jail awaiting his own trial. If you really want another known traitor as an alibi witness, we could fetch him for you...?"

"Your Honor, I object!" Pierre shouted. "My client is being railroaded."

"I don't see anything improper, counselor. Do you have another witness?"

"I - your Honor, can I have a one hour recess? My case is somewhat disrupted."

"Denied. The court has other defendants awaiting trial." Helplessly, Pierre bent over to whisper to Crono.

"I do not think this judge is impartial," Fina said.

"Of course not," Zeo said. "The King is the one person in the country who can _never_ have a fair trial."

Pierre stood up. "You're sure?" Crono nodded. "Your Honor," he said aloud. "we have no defense. We throw ourselves on the mercy of the court." Crono and Zeo both chuckled darkly. In fact, mean laughter arose all through the gallery.

"Under the circumstances," the judge said, "that is equivalent to a guilty plea. In the name of King Guardia XXXIV, I sentence you to be executed by guillotine. The sentence will be carried out in three days' time. Court is adjourned." The gavel banged. The guards grabbed Crono by the shoulders. He spat straight into the slit in one of their visors. The other one clubbed him with the hilt of his sword, and they dragged him from the courtroom half-conscious.

People started filing out of the gallery. Zeo pushed off Fina's shoulder and climbed to his feet. "We should…"

"We should go into Truce," Kurt said, "get supplies, get our bearings, and come back with a plan." Zeo hesitated, and nodded. "You know it's bad when Zeo starts listening to reason," Kurt said.

"I already knew it was bad," Fina answered.

It was summer in this era, so Kurt's furs and most of Fina's went into bundles under their arms. Zeo kept his scarf and hood, though, to hide his distinctive hair and face. The theatric shivers and coughs he added gave onlookers a reason he was wearing them, not to mention keeping them well away.

"We should start at my parents' store," Kurt said once they were through the forest.

"Good idea," Zeo said. "It's a safe, low-profile place, we can get information, weapons." _A sword._ There was an usurper on the throne and his father was due to be executed. Zeo's hand itched for a sword so badly it seemed to burn.

"For that, too," Kurt said.

Zeo realized what his friend really wanted. "Oh. Don't worry, I'm sure your family's fine."

"Are they people of power?" Fina asked. "Could they be in danger from the false king?"

Kurt shook his head. "The only real connection is that I'm their son and I'm apprenticed to someone on the Privy Council."

"Dad knew them when they were kids," Zeo said, "but that's true of half of downtown Truce, it's where he grew up. They'll be fine, Kurt, there's no reason for duFrey to go after them." Kurt nodded, but he still looked worried.

They came into the Truce town center, and Fina looked around in wonder. "Miracles of modern technology, huh?" Kurt asked.

"What? Oh, I expected strange homes and tools. But there's so many _people!_"

"There, see?" Zeo said to Kurt as they came around a corner. They could see the store, open for business. "Not burned down or anything." Kurt nodded, but he didn't relax until they went through the door and saw Elaine standing behind the counter.

"Mom," Kurt sighed. "Thank goodness."

Elaine looked around the empty store, then back to Kurt. "What was that? You're looking for your mother?"

Kurt froze. He swallowed twice, and managed to say, "Yes."

"There was a woman who came in about twenty minutes ago, a redhead with two little girls. Does that sound like her?"

"No." Kurt slumped against the doorframe, staring at nothing, trying to understand. "No, it doesn't."

"Excuse me. I am Fina."

The shopkeeper blinked. "I'm Elaine, dear."

Fina nodded. "Elaine-trader, my friend's knee is hurt. May we sit down so I can look at it?"

"Oh, of course! Here, there's a bench next to the counter here, go right ahead."

"C'mon, Fina, I'm fine," Zeo groused.

"None of that," Elaine snapped. "Put your butt on that bench right now, young man." Zeo was so shocked that he obeyed. Family friend or not, he wasn't expecting to hear that tone from a commoner. Elaine always called him "Prince Zeo" and offered him something to eat when he came by. The closest she ever came to scolding him was a gentle, "Are you sure your mother would like that?"

While Fina was rolling up Zeo's trouser leg, Kurt spoke up again. "I'm sorry to ask a personal question M - uh, ma'am, but are you married?"

"No," Elaine said. "I never really had the heart, after Fritz. . ."

"After Fritz what?"

Elaine gave him a wary look. "Oh, you know."

"I'm afraid I don't." He hesitated. "This is Fritz Liedermark, right?"

"Yes. How did you know?"

"I'm Kurt Liedermark, a relative of his." Zeo hid a smile. Kurt had always been the better liar of the two of them, and the ones where he didn't even really lie were the best. "I was trying to look him up."

"Oh, dear. Elaine looked nervously at the door and waved Kurt closer to the counter. "He vanished," she whispered. "Fifteen years ago, just before the Millennial Fair. He was one of the first."

Kurt went white. "The arrest. Crono and Mistress Lucca didn't get him out."

Elaine looked startled, and gave the three of them an appraising glance. "I never would have thought to ask them, back then," she said, even more quietly. "This was before the old King died. They hadn't started… well, they were still teenagers. No one even guessed where Fritz was until years too late."

Fina was doing her glowing-hand thing to his knee, but Zeo wasn't even paying attention. He was watching Kurt's face - it had that look he got when he was putting something together in his head. "So Crono was never in prison back then?"

"No," Elaine said. "He was well-behaved when we were kids. You never would have guessed." That didn't sound to Zeo like any way Elaine had ever talked about his father.

"At the Millennial Fair," Kurt said slowly, "do you remember Mistress Lucca demonstrating a new invention?"

"Sure," Elaine said, though her face said she thought these questions were getting odd. "The one that worked. Everyone was talking about it. It was this teleporter thing, one of her weirder machines. No one expected it to do anything except maybe explode, but the show went without a hitch."

Kurt was getting pale. "Do you remember anything odd about Crono that day?"

"Not really… well, come to think of it, he showed up with a girl I'd never seen before, a blonde from out of town. But we never saw her around again. I nearly forgot about her." Zeo and Kurt looked at each other. That sounded very, very wrong.

"We… we need to go," Kurt choked.

"You should buy something," Elaine said, "or it'll look odd. A healing tonic for your friend?"

"Sure." Kurt fished in his satchel for gold.

Elaine shook her head. "On the house. For the Red Rose, and good luck."

"Why did she mention a rose?" Fina asked, once they were out the door. "That was strange."

"That wasn't the strangest thing," Zeo said fervently.

"Someplace to talk," Kurt breathed, still pale.

"Grandma's house?" Zeo offered.

"Dangerous, and she won't…" Kurt raised his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. "We'll get a room at the inn."

"Okay," Zeo said. "You're right, if anyone has a link to Dad, she does. The inn, then." They paid for two rooms (the innkeeper barely even looked at Zeo except to notice his limp), and sat down in one of them.

"Kurt," Fina prompted. "You've figured out something about this situation?"

"None of it happened," he muttered.

Zeo tilted his head. "What?"

"Okay," Kurt said. "Okay, say… say Princess Nadia went to the Millennial Fair in disguise and ran into Crono."

"Princess Nadia _did_ go to the Millennial Fair in disguise and run in to Crono," Zeo pointed out.

"Shut up and let me finish. They ran into each other at the fair. They walked around, played some games, had a good time. Finally they went to Lucca's telepad demonstration. Crono tried it first, it worked, everybody clapped. The Princess went next. She asked Crono to hold her pendant, let's say, because the clasp was loose from when it fell off before."

Zeo waited, and then the gold piece dropped and his mouth fell open. "Oh. Oh, _crap._"

Kurt snorted. "No kidding. _None of it happened._ None of them went to the Middle Ages, and so Crono didn't get arrested when they got back for kidnapping the Princess. There was no breakout, and no escape into the future to find out about Lavos. And, incidentally, they didn't rescue my Dad on their way out, and he got his head chopped off before he and Mom were even married. I don't exist."

"But that's not how it works," Zeo objected. "I know this part. When something makes it so you were never born you're supposed to vanish."

"Well, then, say good-bye fast, because my Dad is sixteen years dead and my old maid mother doesn't recognize me. For that matter, you don't exist either, Zeo. Your parents hung out for one day and then never saw each other again, and your Mom ended up marrying some nobleman, who is now the _rightful_ thirty-fourth King of Guardia."

Zeo made a face. "DuFrey? Yuck! That's a bad deal even by princess standards. He'd have been twice her age, and he's a smarmy little weasel to boot."

Fina cleared her throat. "There is a tale that you both know but I do not."

"Huh?" Zeo said. "Oh, right. Well, here's how it was _supposed_ to happen…" Zeo told her the family story, with occasional help from Kurt, up to where they found out about Lavos and swore to stop it. "And then they met other companions and had adventures and finally won, we can tell you that part later. But apparently, something's changed and they never even got started."

"I don't think our being in the past could have changed things this much," Kurt said. "Mistress Lucca and your parents were tearing around the Jurassic era killing everything that growled at them and taking influential people forward in time. If there was going to be any kind of subtle butterfly effect, it would've happened to them first."

"It had to be this," Zeo said, drawing the red stone knife. He stared at it moodily for a few seconds. "I don't know why we're still here, Kurt," he said, "but letting my father get executed when I'm not born yet can't be a good way to keep existing. Besides…"

"Of course," Fina said. "If we knew of a way to restore history, then we might have some difficult decisions to make. But we do not know such a way. Clearly, we fight for your family."

Zeo smiled at her. "Thanks."

She smiled back, but it was sad. "All the people are as one."

He nodded. "We might not have much time." Zeo started to lever himself to his feet (or at least, to his foot) but Fina pushed him back onto the bed. "Fina!"

"You may or may not be struck down by forces of time which we do not understand, but if you go into battle unable to walk, you _will_ die." She pushed him over so he was lying down. "Rest, and hope you are fit to fight when the day comes."

"It's okay," Kurt said. "The execution isn't for three days. We have time."

Zeo hesitated, and then sighed. "Okay. Three days from now, at dawn." He closed his eyes and willed his healing knee to hurry up. "I'm coming, Dad. I promise."


	6. Deja Vu

Deja Vu

1016 AD, omega timeline

-o-

Zeo limped his way through Guardia Forest, with Fina and Kurt close behind. After three days of rest and Fina's healing, his knee was finally strong enough to walk on. He thought he could even run or climb with it, though it wouldn't be exactly fun.

Kurt had gone back to the market and traded the furs he and Zeo had taken from Fina's hut for a sword. It was no Rainbow, or even a match for the red katana Uncle Melchior had given Zeo for his last birthday, but it was still good, sharp water-steel. He had it strapped to his back, so it wouldn't get in the way when he was climbing.

They got to the foot of the castle wall just before the changing of the guard at sunrise. It was the best possible time for a break in - at the end of the graveyard shift, all the guards would be tired and cold and thinking more about their beds than about their jobs. The light was bad, too, a dim, flat grey that could easily convince a sentry he'd seen a shadow instead of an intruder.

The three of them - no, four: Mune was tagging along like someone's little brother - the four of them looked up. Far above them was a bridge spanning between the tops of two towers. Kurt took out his multigun and loaded it with the grapple. He aimed it up at the bridge. "Don't miss," Zeo whispered. Kurt nodded. The shot would be audible from almost anywhere on the castle wall. As soon as he pulled the trigger, they would have to move as fast as possible; another shot would take valuable time.

Much of the prison's security came from the fact that it had no entrance anywhere near ground level. The only way to get in was through the castle and over this bridge. The builders had been so confident in this simple expedient of altitude that they'd built the prison _outside_ the castle's curtain wall. After all, what did it matter if someone got to the base? Scaling the wall would be too slow, they'd be seen before they reached the top. There was no way to get a long enough ladder there without being noticed. And no one could throw a grappling hook that high.

In the old history, Crono had put extra guards on this bridge, once Zeo and Kurt had proved how climbable Guardia Castle was. But this timeline had never heard of the Liedermark Multigun.

The shot echoed off the walls, and several birds were startled into flight. The hook flew up and landed on the bridge. Kurt reeled it in until the hook caught on the railing. "Is it gonna hold?" Zeo asked. Kurt tugged on it, and then hung his full weight from it. It held. "I'll go first," Zeo said. He took the reel from Kurt and stuck the magnet to his belt buckle. A flip of a switch, and he was lifted right off the ground.

He reached the bridge, and started to scramble over the railing. When he tried to put weight on his bad leg, though, it buckled. Zeo had one sick moment to think, "this is gonna _hurt,_" and then the red knife in his belt wedged in the railing. It slowed his fall long enough for him to get handholds, and he pulled himself up.

"Thanks, Mune," he muttered. The green-haired boy appeared, gave him a little smile, and faded out again. Zeo dropped the grapple reel over the side of the bridge so Kurt and Fina could use it.

The three of them were reunited on the bridge without any more scares. The whole maneuver had taken about three minutes. If the sun had begun to rise behind Guardia castle, Zeo couldn't see it, but he could see the mountains now, grey on grey.

Kurt looked over the edge, as he pulled on his gauntlet. "No turning back now," he said. "The guards are already going down there to see what the bang was."

"They're clueless," Zeo said confidently. "Let's do it." He jogged across the bridge, trying not to limp. Kurt and Fina trailed behind him.

"I was very frightened for a moment, Zeo," Fina said. "You almost fell."

Zeo grinned at her. "Eh," he said airily, "I've had scarier moments than that, climbing around this castle." They reached the end of the bridge, and a staircase down into the prison tower. Here Zeo slowed down, so that their footsteps didn't echo down into the room below. When he reached the bottom, he flattened his back against the wall and peeked through the doorway.

"Someone there?" Kurt whispered.

Zeo stepped back from the door and nodded. "It's just a clerk, though, I wish we didn't have to hurt him. . ." There was a sharp rattling sound. Fina had tied a string of dried seeds to her spear, just behind the flint tip. She was spinning the spear slowly, like a graceful dance despite the tight quarters. When she ended a motion, the seeds rattled. Zeo realized she was beginning to glow softly, like moonlight, not sunlight, on new snow.

He heard a chair scraping back, too, from inside the room, and a voice muttering, "What on Earth is that?" Zeo didn't know what Fina was doing, but it was going to get them caught. With his left thumb, Zeo popped his new sword loose in its sheath.

The uniformed clerk stepped into the staircase, and saw them. "Oh," he said. Maybe he'd been starting to say _oh, no_, or _oh my goodness!_ But before he could finish, Fina tapped him on the head with the flat of her spearpoint. She didn't hit him hard - Zeo might have teased a little kid by tapping him so lightly, with anything but a weapon. The light around her swirled, though, and the clerk dropped to the floor like a sack of flour. He breathed loudly, and Zeo realized the man was snoring.

"Wow," Zeo said.

Fina smiled at him. There was mischief in it, and Zeo suddenly realized that Fina wasn't that much older than him. "Oh," she said, "it's not hard to send someone to visit the realm of spirits and dreams." Kurt laughed aloud, and slowly Zeo realized she'd been copying the tone he'd used to brag about climbing the castle. He blushed.

"Okay, well, we're in a hurry," he said. "Let's go." He ran across the room and opened the door there.

In this room there were two guards, one on either side of the room, in oddly stout suits of plate armor. At first Zeo only saw the farther one; he had run right past the other. The guard he saw held up a hand. "You! Stop!" Zeo drew his sword, and in the corner of his eye he caught an answering movement of steel. He spun just in time, and knocked away the broadsword swinging down at his head.

The guard swung again, straight across at chest level. Zeo moved his sword to block. . . and the heavy broadsword slammed through his guard like a hammer through a wicker basket. He cried out as he was slammed aside, into the wall. The sword bit into his right shoulder, though his block at least kept it from lopping the arm right off. Zeo was right-handed, and his sword drooped weakly from the wound. The guard readied his sword again, this time at neck-height. Zeo drew Mune with his left hand and rammed the broken dreamstone right through the steel breastplate. So went Zeo's first true battle.

When he remembered where he was again, and started to catch his breath, he saw the other guard lying on the stones, with a large, smoking hole in his helmet. It must have made a fantastic noise when Kurt shot him, enclosed in this small room, but Zeo hadn't heard it at all.

"No one could have missed the noise of that weapon," Fina said. "They know someone is here, now."

"He was so strong," Zeo said. He was thinking of his father's stories of breaking out of this prison, about the weird guards that all hid their faces behind helmets and shields. He and Lucca had thought they might be Mystics, monsters, but never found out for sure. The-King-his-grandfather had fired all the old guards before Zeo's parents had even married. Zeo thought of mentioning this story, but if he did he would have to take off one of their helmets and check.

"Zeo! Kurt!" Fina snapped. Both boys jumped. (Kurt had been staring at the hole he'd made in that helmet.) "We have little time. I will heal your wound, Zeo, and then we must hurry." Zeo nodded, and Fina rattled her spear and laid a hand on the slash in his shoulder. There was a flash of snow-glare, and, oddly, a sudden burning itch, and the healing was done. It still hurt, but it wasn't bleeding and he could use his arm.

Zeo led his little group through the door. "I think the execution room is this way," he said, turning left and heading down a flight of stairs.

"Don't we want the cells?" Kurt asked as they ran.

"Maybe," Zeo said, "but if Dad's in the cells, we can save him later. If he's in the execution room, later's not good enough." They ran on down staircases and through halls.

"Where are all the guards?" Kurt asked. "I fired a double-charge, it should have shook half the tower."

"Maybe the spirits are with us," Fina said, with a glance at the dreamstone knife. "Or maybe the enemy is waiting in ambush."

"Guards don't think like that," Zeo said absently. "They run at you and say, 'stop.' Or 'please stop, Highness,' if it's me." He wasn't the type to question good luck. "The execution room is just around. . . oh, crap."

Two guards with broadswords were flanking the door they wanted, and one with a very large shield was standing right in front of it. "You three!" one shouted. "Drop your weapons!" Instead, they all drew. Kurt opened the fight with a blast of shot. Mostly it just bounced off the armor and shield, but the guards flinched and staggered back. Zeo leapt at the nearest swordsman. He parried the knife (though it dug deeply into the broadsword) but Zeo's sword sliced into the crack below the helmet.

As the guard fell, Zeo sidestepped around the shield-bearer. The other swordsman swung at him. Zeo deflected the stroke, so that it sparked against the wall. He swung the knife wildly at the shield-bearer to keep him honest. The shield-bearer turned to face him, and Fina stabbed him in the back with her spear. Zeo parried the broadsword again - it wasn't hard as long as he remembered not to block that incredible strength directly. When the guard drew his sword back for another swing, Zeo ducked inside his guard and rammed the knife into his armpit, where he had no armor but chain mail.

The fight probably hadn't been audible inside - the room had been built as a torture chamber, among other things, designed to keep in the sound of screams. The walls were very thick and the door was oak layered over cork. Zeo sheathed his weapons, opened the door, and charged through, dimly aware of Kurt and Zeo at his heels. Someone was tied to a guillotine in the first room, with his head beneath the blade and above the waiting basket. But it wasn't Crono, and there was no one else there. Guillotine blades didn't drop at random, so whoever it was could wait a couple seconds. Zeo slammed open the door into the second room.

Someone with a yellow tunic and spiky red hair was being forced into another guillotine. Zeo's eyes stung when he saw his father alive and well. He nearly called out, but then Crono gave him a look of surprise and total non-recognition. Zeo remembered Kurt's face when Elaine hadn't known who he was, and realized he was probably wearing that same face himself, now. In this history, his dad had only known his mom for the length of a day, and he'd never been born.

"Zeo!" Fina said sharply. Only then did Zeo register the other people in the room. There were _seven_ guards with broadswords, as well as a uniformed but unarmed man with Intelligence insignia. Everyone drew their weapons.

"Kill the prisoner!" the officer yelled.

"No!" Zeo charged forward, his weapons flashing, but he couldn't get through seven fighters in half a second. Kurt took more useful action. Guessing something like this might happen, he'd loaded his gun with the grapple. The central point thunked into the guillotine's frame, just below the blade, and the arms snapped forward. An instant later, one of the guards cut the rope holding the blade up, and it fell. It only fell two inches, though, before it hit the grapple arm and grated to a stop.

Then Zeo and Fina were fighting for their lives. Zeo had both speed and Mune's razor edge, and Fina had reach, but they were badly outnumbered. Fina tried to stab the flint tip of her spear through a crack in her opponent's armor, and it snapped in half. Undeterred, she started glowing, and her spear started a weirdly graceful spin. She smacked a guard with what was left of the point, not even scratching the armor, but the guard collapsed. Another one, though, took advantage of her slow movements to slice open her leg, and she staggered back against the wall.

As for Zeo, he was hard pressed. The heavy swings weren't fast, but their power meant Zeo couldn't block them quickly, either. He'd cut one man down in the surprise of the first charge, but there were three still attacking him, and he didn't have time for any serious attacks. Finally, a sword was swinging straight at his head, and he had no time to block it and no room to get out of the way.

The broadsword struck a metallic grip, and bronze fingers closed on it and pulled. It actually bent before Kurt broke the guard's grip. He spun it around and jammed the point through the slit in its owner's visor. Another guard swung at him; he knocked the sword aside with his gauntlet and punched his attacker in the head, staggering the man back and ringing his helmet like a bell. Zeo took the opening to cut the stunned guard down. The tide of the fight had turned.

"Kill the prisoner!" the officer shouted. "Don't let them retake him!" A guard turned from the rescuers and swung his broadsword down at Crono. Zeo's father was still lying prone by the guillotine, though he'd wriggled his head out of the hole. He rolled away from the sword stroke and got to his knees, his hands still tied behind his back. The guard swung his sword down again. Crono leaned forward, and somehow he reached his tied hands up behind him and caught the sword between his palms. While the guard was goggling at this impossible move, Crono ran the rope around his wrists along the blade. The rope snapped, and he rolled away to the side.

Zeo was desperately trying to fight his way to Crono, but although Fina had dropped another guard with her sleep magic, he still couldn't get through. Crono was nimbly dodging away from his would-be executioner, and he obviously wanted to get to one of the fallen swords. His back was to a wall, though, and he couldn't get past. Zeo pushed forward, but an armored arm pushed him back, and he had to duck a sword stroke. "Dad!" he shouted, forgetting himself in fear and frustration. Crono gave him a startled look.

The door behind the rescuers banged open again. A gunshot rang out, not loud enough to be from Kurt, but a guard's armor was pierced all the same and he fell. A silent arrow flew over Fina's shoulder and killed another. "Crono!" a woman shouted, and Kurt's head snapped around. Zeo didn't look, since his opponent was still standing, but he saw the sheathed sword she threw fly over the battle. Crono caught it, and in one motion he drew the red katana and swung. He didn't just kill his own enemy, he created a razor sharp slash of air that flew straight across the room and killed the officer and Zeo's guard as well.

Zeo lowered his weapons and turned around, panting. The archer was a young blond woman, maybe just a girl, wearing loose clothes and a cloth mask over her lower face. The gunner was a purple-haired woman with thick glasses. With a bizarre sense of deja vu, he recognized Lucca.

"We came to rescue you," she said to Crono. Then she looked around at Zeo, Kurt and Fina. "I guess you didn't need our help after all."

Kurt stared at Lucca, and the blond girl who'd come with her. He should have realized. When she'd told him the story of the original rescue, she'd said, "Well, of course I couldn't let him get his thick head chopped off." And so she couldn't - here she was.

Zeo was just as dumbstruck as him; it was Fina who recovered first. "Hello," she said simply. "I am Fina. My friends are Zeo and Kurt."

"I'm Lucca," she said. Kurt had to bite his tongue so he didn't say, "I know." Lucca gestured to the archer. "This is Marle." Marle? No, Kurt thought, after a second look. The hair and eye color were similar, but this Marle was half Lucca's age, and Queen Nadia was a shade older than her.

But Zeo wasn't as quick to see this. "Mom?" he said incredulously. Crono's sharp green eyes narrowed at him, but he didn't say anything and Zeo didn't notice.

The girl's eyes flashed. "'Mom?' Do I look like someone's mother?" She looked Zeo up and down. "I'd have had to give birth to you when I was two."

"I'm not twelve," Zeo snapped. Marle turned red, but Zeo had guessed her age pretty well, Kurt thought.

Lucca interrupted them. "If you're okay, Crono, I left something in the outer room." Crono nodded, and she ducked out.

Marle looked at them all again. "What on Earth are you people doing here, anyway?" she asked. Fina was taking advantage of this brief break to tend the cut in her leg. Kurt pulled his grapple out of the guillotine, letting it slice down on empty air.

"Saving Crono," Zeo answered. Thankfully he remembered not to call him "Dad" again. Kurt was going to have similar problems with "sire." "Thanks for the help," Zeo added, sounding offhand but sincere.

"Help? _We're_ saving Crono," Marle said, "and I'll thank you when you get out of our way. This is no job for amateurs."

"Oh, and you're a veteran of a thousand battles?" Zeo snapped back. "We got almost a dozen guards, and you got two."

"Seven," she corrected. "Two on the way here and the five that you saw."

"You can't count Crono's kills!" Zeo shouted. "He's the one we're trying to rescue!"

"He's with us," Marle answered. "You're just interlopers, and you're interfering with a carefully laid plan."

"We saved your butts! What would you two have done against seven swords, with your bow and your gun? One shot each, and then the show's over."

Marle opened her mouth to answer, probably something about the short sword on her hip and the large hammer Lucca carried, but just then Crono cleared his throat.

Zeo ducked his head, and muttered, "Sorry." He said it to Crono, though, not Marle. Surprisingly, Marle fell quiet, too. Crono herded them into the outer room.

There Lucca was standing with the man who'd been in the other guillotine. Kurt was startled to see it was Taban. "The Red Rose," Lucca's father said, as though it was a greeting.

"No time, Dad," Lucca said. "They're probably rallying for a mass attack right now. If we get pinned in here, it's all over." She opened the outer door, and Crono took point and led them out. The seven of them ran back through the halls. They spotted only a couple guards, who retreated instantly. Lucca and Marle took potshots at them, and usually hit. Kurt saved his ammo; his weapon was much slower to reload than theirs.

It looked like Lucca was right, and the guards were gathering for a mass attack somewhere. But it had better be soon, hadn't it? It wouldn't do them much good to be in a large group if they had to chase along behind in plate armor. But the group passed through the long room where the two guards had been, and no mass attack. They went unmolested through the office where the poor clerk still slept soundly. Then they were running across the bridge to the castle. The sun was up now, but a cold wind was blowing out of the northern mountains.

"Where's the mass attack?" Zeo asked.

"Distracted, maybe," Lucca said. "If even half the plan went right, the whole castle should be in the most amazing five-sided uproar by now. But this still seems too easy." There was a deep rumbling, and the bridge shook. "What's that?"

Zeo and Kurt looked at each other. "Uh-oh," Kurt said.

Zeo snickered. "Here we go again!"

Marle glared at them. "What are you…" The bridge rumbled again, and out the far door came a great tank in the shape of a dragon, with spiked wheels and a head on a long, articulated neck. For some reason, Kurt took this moment to wonder if they had a way to get that impossible thing up and down stairs, or if it had been installed in the tower for this specific purpose.

Lucca just looked the thing up and down and drew her pistol. "Think we can take it, Crono?"

"Yeah," Kurt answered for him. "I'm pretty sure you can." It took all his willpower not to start giggling like Zeo.

"Kill the head first," Marle and Zeo said at the same time. Then they looked at each other. "How did you know that?" they demanded, still in perfect unison. Something clicked in the back of Kurt's mind, but he was interrupted before he figured out what it was.

"While they are doing that," Fina said, "we must defend their backs." Kurt looked back. Armored guards were coming out of the prison tower and advancing toward them. The promised mass attack had finally come, when the rescuers were pinned against the castle's strongest weapon. Crono caught Zeo's eyes, and the prince nodded.

"Let's do it!" Lucca shouted.


	7. The Red Rose

The Red Rose

1016 AD, omega timeline

"Let's do it!" Lucca shouted.

She and Crono would be fighting the dragon tank, but Marle had no time to watch or help. The attack from the other direction was ten strong, led by a shield-bearer. They had to come single-file, but that huge shield covered the whole line. Marle nocked an arrow to her short bow, smoothly drew back, aimed, and released. The broadhead point thunked into the thick timber and quivered there. "Damn," she muttered. The quiet woman in the white furs, Fina, readied her useless broken spear. The kid with the big gun snapped it open and frantically started reloading it. Neither of them would be any use in holding the line. Marle reached for the short sword at her hip.

"Guardia!" Marle's head snapped up. Usually that cry meant someone was attacking her, but it was the blond jerk with the two blades, Zeo. He had both weapons drawn and was charging, though Marle thought he was favoring his left leg. "Guardia!" he shouted again.

The soldiers, unnerved by having their own battle cry shouted at them, flinched back. Zeo sliced both weapons at the shield-bearer. The sword barely made an impression on the huge tower shield. The red knife sliced a gash right through it, but the blade wasn't long enough to reach the person behind the shield. Zeo, expecting to crash past a wounded or dying man, instead ricocheted off a firmly-held wall of wood. He did manage to bounce past the shield-bearer instead of backwards, but that just meant he caromed off the railing and tumbled to the stones in the middle of the enemy troop.

Marle fired another arrow, but the shield-bearer remembered to face front in time. The arrow buried itself in the shield beside the first. Meanwhile, Zeo got to his feet just in time to parry attacks from both directions. He spun around, trying to watch both ways at once, his two weapons flailing. His hair flapped in the wind of his own motions. Finally, he let out a desperate, wordless scream and seemed to slash in four directions at the same time. Blades of air flew out from his weapons, a technique Marle had never seen anyone but Crono use before. Four guards fell, one of them right over the side of the bridge.

Marle was startled from this, she had to admit, impressive sight by a deafening bang in her ear - Kurt's gun. A grapple appeared, embedded in the tower shield. Kurt grabbed the line it trailed in his strange gauntlet, and yanked. The shield was pulled right out of its owner's hands.

Marle wasn't about to let a couple of amateurs outdo her. She drew back another arrow, and slipped into a light trance. She was one with the arrow, one with the target. Blue light appeared along her line of aim, and she fired. The arrow drove through the former shield-bearer and came halfway out the back of the armored man behind him. Now the front of the attack was beyond Zeo; he had enemies on only one side by now. His fighting took on an almost leisurely style, as though he intended to stand there and hold this narrow bridge all day. Marle thought he just didn't want to move on that bad leg more than he had to.

Whether it was true or not, the guards seemed to believe his bravado. When he killed one of them, the rest fell back. Zeo walked backwards to the rest of the group. "That charge was the stupidest thing I've ever seen," Marle said. "You're lucky you're not dead." She spotted a gash in his back, and another, shallower cut on his hip.

She gave an exasperated sigh and spread her hands. She concentrated, and let her aura become visible around her. The light washed over Zeo, and his bleeding stopped. He looked back and smiled, about to thank her. "You're an idiot," she interrupted him, "but you're useful for the moment." Zeo frowned at the insult and faced forward again. Behind her, Marle heard Lucca shout _look out!_ and something that sounded disturbingly like fire. She allowed herself a quick glance back and saw Crono still in the fight, though his boots were smoking.

She heard a warning from Kurt and looked back. The guards were attacking again, this time at what passed for a charge for men in plate armor. "Zeo!" Kurt called. "Slide trick!"

Marle had no idea what this meant, but Zeo nodded. "Fina," he yelled, "hold the line." And he ran at the attackers again, still screaming the enemy's battle cry. Kurt fired his gun. Marle winced, but it was the grapple again, and it was aimed over Zeo's head. It caught a gargoyle on the prison tower and reeled taut. The lead guard tensed as Zeo approached, but instead of attacking, the boy jumped onto the bridge railing and ran past. Fina came up behind him, glowing like the moon, and smacked the leader's helmet with her spear point. He started to collapse forward. Fina pushed him back with her spear, so he fell on the man behind him.

Meanwhile Zeo was running right past the whole line of enemies, dodging or jumping over each guard's sword without ever losing his balance. He'd managed to sheathe his sword, but still held the knife. At last, he leaped up and grabbed the line of Kurt's grapple, and started sliding back down. He kicked the guards in the back of their heads, knocking them over like a line of steel dominos, until the grapple was pulled loose. Then he landed knife-first on the one about to swing at Fina. The guards retreated again, in a poor approximation of order.

Marle took another glance back at the other fight. Lucca was on one knee, bleeding heavily from her leg, but the entire front of the dragon's head had been chopped off, and it was leaking steam and sparks from several holes. With a confident nod, she turned back to the prison side of the bridge.

"Idiots!" came a very deep voice from inside the tower. "If you can't handle them, I'll do it myself." A huge figure lumbered out. He was eight feet tall and five feet wide, in heavy plate armor and a morning star. Crazily, Marle thought she saw a single eye leering from the slit in the center of his helmet.

"I don't think he'll fall asleep," Fina muttered. Kurt was desperately rummaging in his bag for ammo. Zeo looked at them, and at the huge captain, and took one determined step forward, and another. Then he broke into a charge. "Guardiaaaaaa!" he screamed, leaping at the captain with both swords raised. The huge morning star swatted him out of the air.

Zeo flew backwards, weapons knocked from his hands. The red knife embedded itself in the railing, and the sword, about to fly off to fall on the cliffs below, instead clattered off it to land on the bridge. As for Zeo, he bounced off the rail on the other side and nearly flew off himself before he grabbed the stone with one hand. The guard captain laughed as he slowly pulled himself up. Marle shot an arrow at the giant, and then another, but they just bounced off the thick armor. Obviously in pain, Zeo rolled onto the bridge, picked up his sword, and pulled his knife out of the railing. "Just try that again, monster!" he shouted.

The captain laughed again. "Sure. Next time I'll spread your brains for the crows to eat." He hefted his spiked mace. Marle drew back another arrow, concentrating. Zeo charged forward, just like last time. But instead of jumping straight at the giant, he first leaped onto the railing, hoping for more height. The guard raised his mace to bash Zeo away again, and Marle took her shot. With a streak of blue, the arrow drove through the plate armor into the man's belly. He brought the morning star down, curling around the wound in a belated attempt to protect himself, and that's when Zeo struck from above. His sword and knife each cut deep into the captain's shoulders. He roared, and Zeo kicked off his chest, pulling both weapons free and rolling backwards. He came to his feet and snapped his blades into guard position.

The giant staggered back, and looked at the two of them. "They don't pay me enough for this," he rumbled, and collapsed back into the prison tower. Marle didn't think he was dying, but he certainly looked out of the fight.

"Now, Crono!" Marle spun around at Lucca's shout. She saw Crono leap onto the dragon tank's back and drive his sword straight down into its body. Sparks and smoke gushed out like blood. Crono slashed the thing open in a spray of wires and gears, and leaped back. It arced electricity everywhere for a couple seconds, and then exploded. Marle ducked, covering her eyes against the flash and flying shrapnel. When she looked again, the tank was just gone, along with most of that part of the bridge.

"Damn it!" she shouted. "We need to get across that. It'll never hold us now."

"I've got it," Kurt said, loading his grapple one more time. He fired it over the gap, and it caught on the other side.

"I'll go last and bring the reel," Zeo said.

Marle snorted. Zeo was bruised, bleeding, and staggering, and certainly not up for a delicate climb over an unstable bridge. Kurt seemed to have the same thought. "Forget it," he said. "I'll make a new one." He took the reel off his gun and tied it to the bridge railing. "Go! Split your weight between the bridge and the line, it should hold."

"I'm lightest," Marle said. "I'll go first." She started suiting actions to words immediately, edging across the remaining edge of the bridge with both hands pressing down on the grapple line.

"Right," Lucca said. "Then in increasing order of weight." She peered at the group. "I think Zeo, Kurt, Fina, me, Crono. You're last, Dad."

Taban nodded grimly. "I'm probably the least important today, anyway." Lucca frowned, not appreciating this gallows humor.

One by one they crossed the fragile bridge. A few bits of new gravel broke off and fell into the shadows below, but other than that it held. When Taban set his feet on solid stone, everyone sighed in relief. Crono tilted his head toward the tower, and they all followed him down into the castle.

As Lucca had planned, it was a madhouse. A bomb had destroyed a little used side-gate, there was a fire in the kitchens, and intruders had been reported in the Queen's tower. All these places were swarming with guards; the intruders went nowhere near any of them. Instead, they ran straight for the front door.

Even in this confusion, the castle's main entrance wasn't left unguarded. One of the guards had been called away, but his partner had been prudently left behind. This wasn't quite prudent enough, however. Marle proved why the door had rated two guards in the first place by putting a silent arrow through the man's throat before he could give the alarm. Then she looked up at the balcony, and saw the sad-eyed figure in an ornate dress and coronet. "This wasn't in the plan," Marle thought wildly. "She was supposed to be in the tower. . ."

No one else was there, just seven traitors and the Queen. Crono looked up, and met her eyes. With a slight smile, he bowed. She inclined her head in acknowledgement. Marle carefully kept her face neutral, but the Queen's eyes held hers for a second. Zeo actually grinned and gave the Queen of Guardia a jaunty little salute. Then Nadia turned and went back the way she had come.

"Time for me to go," Marle said. "For the Red Rose."

"For the Red Rose," Taban answered. Lucca added, "Good luck." Marle nodded, and vanished deeper into the castle.

"Where's she going?" Kurt asked, as Marle slipped away.

"She has other work to do," Lucca said. "We're going this way. Hurry!" She led them out into the courtyard, at a run. The haste was quickly explained - they were seen immediately by guards on the wall.

"Close the gates!" someone yelled. His squad hurried to obey. Kurt raised his gun and fired. The range was a bit long for him, but the soldiers running for the gate all staggered or flinched from the spray of buckshot. Almost simultaneously, Lucca fired her pistol, and their officer dropped like a sack of potatoes.

The rescuers kept running for the gate. The leaderless, beleaguered soldiers hesitated. Then one of them shouted, "It's Crono! Run!"

"No, you fools!" someone shouted from atop the gatehouse. Another officer, no doubt. Lucca shot him off the wall before he could give any orders. Crono loosened his katana in its sheath, and the poor soldiers broke. Then they were through. There was a cleared area around the castle, before the forest started, and a few of the confused soldiers on the curtain wall had the wit to remember their crossbows. Two quick shots from Lucca discouraged this show of initiative. She was wounded and firing on the run, but Kurt hadn't seen her miss yet.

Once they made the woods, it was all over but the parade.

Crono called a halt after only a couple minutes. Lucca seemed about to argue, but then she sunk down onto a handy log. "Just for a bit," she said. Her leg was still bleeding.

"Hold still, Lucca-Leader," Fina said, producing a bandage from somewhere. Kurt hadn't gotten very far in teaching her modern technology, but she'd seen the utility of cloth and cotton bandages over leather and moss right away. She quickly wrapped Lucca's wound and tied the bandage off. Her hands glowed as she worked, and she finished with two quick shakes of her spear-rattle.

"Handy," Lucca commented. "We usually need Marle for that sort of thing." Kurt caught Zeo's eye. The way Marle had healed the prince on the bridge had looked _remarkably_ like Queen Nadia's Aura. If they hadn't just seen the two of them in the same room. . .

"Now, you, Zeo," Fina said. "You took a nasty hit." Zeo didn't argue, but sat down and let himself be treated. "How's your knee?" the shaman asked, when she was done glowing.

Zeo waved her off and stood up. "Fine."

"I'll look at it later. Now," she deadpanned, "I suggest that you all try not to become injured again today." Kurt was too tired to laugh, but she got a chuckle out of Zeo and Crono, at least. "The spirits are tired and so am I."

"Okay, time to go," Lucca said. "They'll remember to search the forest eventually." But if they did, it wasn't before the rescuers made it back to Truce.

Lucca led them into the dock district. Kurt found the route familiar, and as they wound their way among the square, ugly warehouses, a theory emerged in his head. When she led them to a particular door, the theory was confirmed. Lucca fumbled in her pockets. "Where'd I put that key?"

Kurt pulled a key out of his bag, and fit it into the back door of his parents' warehouse.

Everyone but Zeo and Fina stared at him. Lucca finally dug out an identical key and held it up. In fact, it was the _same_ key. "How'd you get that, boy?" Taban growled.

Kurt grinned. "I don't think we've been formally introduced, sir. My name is Kurt Liedermark." It took them a few seconds to make the connection. Predictably, Lucca got it first.

"Elaine," she said.

"Bad security," Taban added.

Lucca pointed a thumb at Crono. "Apparently not, eh?" But she was frowning, too. "Anyway, come on." She led them inside, around behind a pile of boxes, and into the open back of what looked like a solid six-foot crate. She pulled a ring on the bottom, and it swiveled up - it was a trap door.

"Now, that's new," Kurt commented. Underneath was a ladder down into the darkness. They all climbed down, and Crono led them through a narrow, switchback passage, with walls full of arrow slits.

"Now _this_ place is _defensible_," Zeo said. "No way we could have snuck in here."

"Explosives could collapse the whole thing," Kurt noted. "But barring that, the six of us could hold off the whole army down here."

Finally they reached the end of the passage, and it opened up into a large hall. Kurt jumped when he saw the huge shape looming right around the corner, but then he recognized it. It was a Gato, one of Lucca's battle robots. It looked a bit like the Mark III Kurt remembered, except the parts were cruder. Beyond the Gato, about twenty armed young men and women were sitting around, apparently waiting. When they saw Crono they all started cheering. "The Red Rose! Crono and the Red Rose! Down with the King!" Crono grinned and waved at them

Lucca gestured them in. "Welcome to the headquarters of the Red Rose Rebellion. Make yourselves at home."

Most of the rebels left once they'd had a chance to talk to Crono - or rather, Zeo thought, once they had a chance to touch him and make sure he was alive. Zeo, Kurt, and Fina found themselves sitting in what was apparently a planning room. The table held maps and a large slate with chalk, though no sign of actual written plans.

"I think I'm starting to get a handle on this place," Kurt said.

Zeo shook his head. "I'm not." The cheers he'd heard in the main hall were still making his eyes cross - "Hooray Crono! Down with the King!"

"It seems simple enough to me," Fina said. "The chief - the King - is evil, so heroes have banded together in secret against him. I already knew that Zeo's father and Kurt's mistress were among the greatest heroes of this age." She shrugged. "But then, this is the only version of these events I have seen. Perhaps it is more confusing for you." Zeo nodded. "Would you like to. . ."

"There you are." It was Marle, still masked. She put one hand on her hip and pointed at Zeo. "Okay, brat, no one's trying to kill us and we've got all the time in the world. So you're going to sit there and tell me why you tried to foul up a perfectly good mission."

"Foul up?" Zeo leapt to his feet. "_Brat?_ Look, I don't have to answer to you. I was saving my f-friend, and _you_ barged in to _our_ mission."

"Crono's never seen you before in his life!" Crono, Zeo realized, had come in after Marle, and was watching with a vaguely exasperated expression. Lucca and Taban were on his heels. Marle ignored them. "And by what possible standard was that _your_ mission?"

"We were there first!"

"We're the Red Rose! You're three rookies with two good weapons between you!"

"You're a spoiled little witch! You're bossy, you're arrogant, you can't stand not being in the spotlight, and you think you own the world!" Off to the side, Kurt was holding back laughter for some reason. Zeo paid no attention. "You keep talking like I don't know what I'm doing, but if Crono had had to wait for you he'd be dead, and if you don't like that, Your Royal Highness, then -" Suddenly the tip of Marle's short sword was at his throat. Zeo stopped his rant short, with a soft choking sound.

"How did you know?" Marle's whisper could have cut silk.

"How did I know what?" Zeo rasped. "The Highness thing? It was just a joke. You're a stuck-up girl who calls yourself Marle, you have to have heard it before."

Kurt groaned. "Zeo, shut up." Lucca and Crono had their hands on their weapons now, too.

"I don't think they did know," Lucca said. "They do now, of course."

"They also know the connection between the name Marle and the royal family," Marle said, still in that deadly whisper. "Not even Taban and Elaine know that." She pressed her sword point forward; Zeo stepped back.

She wasn't really holding it right - her elbow was locked. Zeo could duck back, draw, and strike before she could react, but he wouldn't have time for a harmless disarm. "Don't make me hurt you," he said.

"Don't make me laugh. _How do you know?_"

Zeo swallowed. The motion made a prick of blood on his Adam's apple. As soon as he said the ridiculous words "time travel," she was going to make him draw.

"The same way you do, Princess," Kurt said suddenly. Zeo and Marle both froze, though they didn't dare look away from each other.

"That's ridiculous," Marle said.

"No, it's not," Kurt said. "Something's been bugging me about you two, and I didn't know what it was, until you reacted to 'Your Highness' like it was true." He walked up and pulled Marle's mask down off her face. Zeo gasped. She looked like his mother. She looked like _him_.

"He's your brother."


	8. Family Matters

Family Matters

1016 A.D., alternate timeline

-o-

"He can't be," Lucca gasped. "He looks like the queen, but. . ." She snapped a look at Crono. He held up his hands defensively and shook his head.

"If she's the princess," Zeo said, "she'll be wearing Mom's dreamstone pendant." Silently, Marle reached into the throat of her suit, and pulled out the pendant.

"How did you. . ."

"I usually get out of the castle when the guard on the northeast tower takes his break," Zeo said, "but with everyone so excited I bet you had to use the blind spot on the west wall." Marle's eyes got wider. "Your real name," Zeo said, "is probably Aliza. After Her-Majesty-Grandmama. Mom told me she would have named me that, if I'd been a girl."

"Lucca's right," Princess Aliza said. "You can't be. There is no such person. If Mother had another child, the whole kingdom would know."

"We should explain," Kurt said. "We're time travelers. Zeo and I traveled back to the Ice Age by accident, from a 1016 with a different King and, obviously, a different Heir. But we changed something, and when we came back with Fina it wasn't quite our home, it was… this."

One glance warned Zeo not to mention who the "different King" was. It made sense - Zeo wasn't about to throw himself on a "father" who didn't know him. He wasn't a baby.

"Time travel?" Lucca said. "I mean, it's a cute theory, but I don't see how it could ever really be done. . ."

"The key is finding a standing time-space resonance point, called a Gate," Kurt said. "Then you can open it with. . . well, here." He pulled out a piece of paper and sketched her a rough schematic of a Gate Key.

"Who taught you that?" Lucca asked.

Kurt smiled wryly. "You did, Mistress. I'm your apprentice."

Lucca laughed. "The other me, you mean? What's my apprentice doing hanging out with the Prince of Guardia?" Since she herself was hanging out with the Princess of Guardia, she didn't mean it too seriously.

"You were on the Privy Council," Zeo said. "There's no Red Rose Rebellion in my world. Dad's a good king, and Mom loves him." That last seemed to affect Aliza more than anything else. She bit her lip and looked away.

"Wait a minute," Lucca said. "Zeo, your parents never married - you were never born. Isn't that a paradox?"

Zeo winced. "I've been trying not to think about that."

"It's worse for me," Kurt said. "My father is - was - Fritz Leidermark."

There was a solemn pause. "I'm sorry," Lucca said quietly. "We never knew until years after."

"Don't apologize - in my timeline you saved him. But yeah," Kurt rubbed his hair, "this happened before, and apparently last time the person vanished in a few hours. It's been three or four days, for us."

"Like waiting in a guillotine," Zeo muttered. Crono gave him a dry sort of smile.

"So you want to restore your history," Lucca mused. "Quickly."

"Wait a minute," Aliza said. "If they do that, what happens to me?"

"Er." Kurt said. "Well. By one way of looking at it, you grow up in a happy family and a peaceful kingdom."

Aliza folded her arms. "As a boy." Zeo bit his thumb at her. "And couldn't you also say that I'll vanish and _he'll_ live?"

"Don't be childish, Marle," Lucca said. "If we could undo this whole war and bring back everyone who died - all the way back to Fritz - isn't that worth anything? Isn't that worth_everything?_"

Aliza bit her lip, took a deep breath, and nodded.

"Okay, then. . ." Lucca looked around. "Wait. We're not secure enough for this. Marle, put your mask back on. We need to clear this whole half of the base. This whole mess is need-to-know only, and nobody else needs to know. Not another word until I get back." She strode out of the room.

"May I ask you for food?" Fina said.

"Oh, sure," Aliza said, adjusting her mask over her nose. "It's this way. I'm hungry, too." Kurt and Zeo tagged along. . . but as Zeo was going out the door, last in line, Crono put a hand on his shoulder. Zeo's eyes widened. He glanced at Kurt, who nodded, and followed Fina and Aliza toward the pantry.

"Food for five, uh, three," Aliza told the cook. "And don't dawdle, Lucca's coming around to dismiss you to quarters." She looked back into the hallway. "Where did Crono and Zeo go?"

"They hung back to talk," Kurt said. "I think Crono wanted to thank him."

Aliza stood for a moment, distracted, as the cook dished out her dinner. "Thanks," she said without looking. "I'll be back for it." And she started back toward the planning room.

"Where you going?" Kurt asked, following her. Fina stayed with the food, looking after them curiously.

"Something strange is going on here." She looked at Kurt. "Who _is_ the king in your timeline?"

"Um. . . couldn't tell you, off the top of my head. You know how it is, everyone just calls him King Guardia."

"You liar. He's your best friend's father." Kurt hesitated. "Or, why did Zeo spend three days figuring out how to rescue Crono when he thought he had six hours to live? What would make some random commoner that important?" They were getting close enough to hear Crono and Zeo's voices. Aside from pitch, they sounded exactly the same. "I have eyes. It's not hard to guess who Mother would have married if she'd been free to choose."

Kurt sighed. "Look, they just want some time to talk. Let's just leave them be. . ." Aliza stepped into the planning room doorway. Crono and Zeo were across the room. Zeo was leaning against the wall, as though to favor his bad leg, but he was hunched in on himself miserably. Neither of them saw Aliza and Kurt.

"I thought you were going to die," Zeo was saying. "I still don't know if you're alive in the other timeline."

Crono put his hand on Zeo's head. It was an awkward gesture, but it had the aspect of a blessing. He leaned forward and murmured something.

Zeo broke down and grabbed him in a fierce hug. "No, I wasn't. Not like you. Oh, Dad, I was so scared."

Aliza started into the room, expression fierce. Kurt grabbed her elbow. She fought him for a moment, then broke away and ran back down the hallway, silent as a ghost. Kurt went after her, as quietly as he could, which wasn't very.

She was slumped on the floor around the corner, back to the wall. "Do you have any idea what it's like, living with that cold son of a Countess up in the castle? All I am to him is proof that the crown won't stay in his family. I'm _useless_, because I'm not a boy. He ordered the guards not to teach me to fight - 'we shall, at very least, have a _proper_ princess to marry off.'" Her impression of her father's voice was nasty and precise. "The sergeant who defied him was one of the first people to die for the Red Rose." She lowered her mask enough to wipe her nose.

"If he was that disappointed in you," Kurt reasoned, "wouldn't he have tried again?"

"He wanted to. Mother refused him. There was a doctor who said another birth might kill her; I don't know if it was the truth. The rat threatened to have her killed anyway." Kurt sucked air in through his teeth. "Thank God he's such a gutless worm."

"That brainless brat," she jerked her head back, indicating Zeo, "is everything I was supposed to be. And Crono. . . my mother told me about the Millennial Fair. She didn't tell his name, but whenever Crono looks at me, there's this bitterness way in the back of his eyes. And I'd always imagine how it might have been."

"Aliza. . ."

"He's supposed to be _my_ father," she hissed. "He's supposed to be _my father!_" She pounded the wall. Kurt grabbed her fist before she could do it again.

"You'll hurt your hand." He unfolded her fist, very gently, and slipped his hand into hers. She didn't resist.

-o-

Lucca looked around the planning table. "Okay, we're all set. Where were we?" Nobody answered her. Crono was looking at Zeo, who wouldn't meet his eyes. Aliza was glaring at Zeo, and Kurt was looking sadly at Aliza.

Obviously Fina had missed something, probably more than one thing. "You had just decided to help us restore Zeo and Kurt's history," she said, ending the awkward silence.

"Okay, then," Lucca said. "How do we do that?"

Zeo put his knife on the table. "We put this back together. This is Mune, half of the dreamstone knife that was supposed to turn into the legendary sword Masamune. This guy in black took it and brought it forward to 1016, where it, uh," he glanced guiltily at Kurt, "got broken." Fina could not resist a smirk. She wondered which one of them had done it.

"So we fix it and bring it back, and everything's fine?"

"I. . . I think so," Kurt said. "Certainly breaking the Masamune wasn't good for history. But if that's the only problem, I don't know why history split off when it did - you guys should have_started_ your quest and failed halfway through."

"We can kill that game when we find it," Fina said. "We know we should restore the knife, so we shall."

"So where's the other half?" Aliza asked.

Zeo sighed. "That's the thing, the wizard who took the knife still has it. And he's a time traveler - I doubt he's hanging around this era."

"I also doubt," Fina said, "that he is on the snow plains of my time, back through the Gate we came here by. We should hunt for his time of origin."

Lucca thought about this. "So what you need now is a new Gate? How do we find it?"

Zeo frowned and toyed with the knife. "It's hard to say," Kurt said. "Last time they all got found by accident, or with tools we don't have here." The knife wobbled to a stop. Zeo spun it again, idly. "And they're invisible until you bring a Gate Key nearby - or Mune, which apparently acts like a Key." The knife finished spinning again, and Zeo reached for it.

"Wait!" Everyone stopped and stared at Fina. "Zeo, spin the knife again. Faster, this time."

Zeo looked confused, but he shrugged, grabbed the red knife by the middle, and spun it hard. When it stopped, Fina laid a string of beads along side it, to mark the direction it pointed. "Again." Zeo spun Mune again, and when it stopped, it was again parallel to the beads. "Always, the knife points the same way - south."

"Dreamstone's not magnetic, though," Kurt said.

"And anyway," Lucca added, consulting some round device from her pocket, "that's not due south."

"Mune knows our way," Fina said firmly.

"You do?" Zeo said, not to Fina but to empty space - or rather, to a spirit Fina and the others could not see. "Uh," he said after a moment. "He says he can hear the wind blowing through a maybeso, far away." He shrugged apologetically. "He gets a little weird sometimes."

"Which is weirder," Aliza muttered, "the knife, or the guy _talking_ to the knife?" Zeo heard - he'd been supposed to, Fina guessed - and gave her a dirty look.

"Far away in that direction means the southern continent," Lucca said, "unless it's in the middle of the ocean. Either way, Crono and Marle and I won't be able to help you directly. The ferries are watched, and so is Zenan Bridge. They'd recognize us."

"Anyway," Aliza said, "I have to get back, before I'm missed."

"But we do have people who can help you," Lucca went on. "Crono can introduce you."

-o-

"How nice of you to visit," she said, kissing Crono on the cheek. "And who are your friends?"

"I'm Zeo," said Zeo, feeling very strange at introducing himself to his own grandmother.

"Oh, you're adorable," she said, pinching his cheek. "He looks just like you when you were that age," she added to Crono, who coughed self-consciously. Apparently some things never changed, even when the entire course of history was knocked askew.

"This is Kurt, and that's Fina," Zeo went on.

"Good to see you, ma'am," Kurt said, who of course had met her before. He should have said "meet you."

"Of course," she said smoothly. "How have you been?" This made Kurt blink, until he remembered that Zeo's white-haired grandmother was part of a rebellion in this timeline and even in the old one was startlingly bright when she paid attention. She knew this was Red Rose business, and if she sounded casual it was because she also knew how thin her walls were. She had not said Crono's name.

"It's been a rough few days," Kurt admitted. "Better just lately."

"Thank you for welcoming me into your house," Fina said, pronouncing the last word awkwardly.

"Why, you're very welcome, dear. Can I take your coat?"

"Ah, no, thank you." Fina had sold most of her furs, but she kept one waist-length white cape. A shaman was no shaman unless she wore white fur.

"Whatever makes you comfortable." As she turned away, she gave Zeo an approving wink. Zeo choked and muttered something like _how does she always do that?_

"We can't stay long," Kurt said. "We're on our way to the southern continent."

"Oh, really? Well, it just happens that I own a cart I hire sometimes to merchants who want things sent to other cities. I have a trip coming up, and I've been looking for some healthy young people to do the heavy lifting." She was a smuggler for the Red Rose, of course, and this whole conversation was a cover. There was no need to say anything suspicious here, so they didn't.

"That sounds perfect," Zeo said.

"Then we can leave this afternoon.

-o-

"What's in the barrels?" the guard asked.

"Apples," Zeo's grandmother said. "Bound for market in Porre." Zeo, Kurt, and Fina lounged among the barrels like bored teenagers, their weapons hidden in the bottom of the cart.

"Yeah? Well, we'd better crack a couple open, and take a look."

"Oh?" The old woman was shifting a small purse of coins from hand to hand. "Well, you may certainly look if you think it's worth the time."

"Ahh. . . no, come to think of it, it's probably not necessary."

"What a nice boy." The little purse slipped out of her hand and landed right at the guard's feet. "Oops, how clumsy of me. Well, I'll see you boys on the way back." And she shook the reins, and the cart rolled past the checkpoint.

"They have to know you're a smuggler," Zeo said quietly, a few minutes later.

"Yes. An eager young officer had my barrels cracked open once. You know what he found?"

"Apples?" Kurt guessed.

"It was potatoes that time, dear, but you've got the right idea. Half the time I'm just giving some young people an excuse to be on the bridge."

"One side!" a voice shouted behind them. "Make way, in the name of the King!" However much he shouted, though, it was late afternoon on Zenan Bridge, and he wasn't going to go much faster than anyone else.

"Hey," Zeo said, looking back. "Isn't that the Infinite Boredom Wagon?"

"Pardon?" Fina asked.

"The Heir's formal carriage," Kurt translated. "And yeah, it is. It's not the same one, but it's got the right heraldry."

"So inside is Princess Aliza," Fina said. "While outside are fifteen guards in face-concealing helmets."

As the Infinite Boredom Wagon struggled past, they all considered the likelihood of Marle asking her father for an escort to the southern continent.

"His Smarmy Majesty must have finally figured her out," Zeo said. "We've gotta do something."

"What you 'got to do,' young man," his grandmother said, "is get far away from my cart before you do put on your masks and start waving swords around. There's no reason to throw away my cover, you might need it."

"Yes, of course," Kurt said. He tossed Zeo the bundle with his sword belt in it, and picked up his own bag. "Come on, guys. I have a plan."


	9. The Flight

The Flight

1016 AD, omega timeline

-o-

"Did you people have anything resembling a plan?" Marle shouted. She was hanging from a piece of the Infinite Boredom Wagon, that Kurt had shot through with his newly-rebuilt grapple. The line ran forty yards up, over the rail of Zenan Bridge, and three times around Kurt's gauntlet. The constant winds of San Dorino Strait threatened to swing her into the bridge support.

"This is the plan!" Kurt shouted back, which was approximately true.

Marle looked down below her, at the splintered wreckage of her wagon and a good bit of the bridge deck drifting away through the Strait. Her dress, now about forty pounds of ruined, waterlogged silk, hung from her like an overly affectionate quilt. "You are the worst planner I've _ever met_!"

Kurt rolled his eyes. "You're not under arrest any more, right?" Actually, the satchel charge had done way more damage than he'd expected to the bridge. On the upside, there were fewer guards left than he'd thought there would be.

"Could you pull her up a little faster, please?" Zeo panted, fighting the last three all at once. Fina, fighting with a steel weapon for the first time, had just finished her one opponent.

"Whine whine whine," Kurt griped, grabbing the railing with his gauntlet and pinning the grapple line down. "Tell someone they're going to inherit a kingdom and suddenly nothing is good enough for them." He opened a clasp on the wrist, pulled his hand out with the gauntlet still gripping, and picked up his multigun. He aimed, fired, dropped the gun, and put his hand back in the gauntlet before he heard his target's armor hit the ground. "I get no gratitude at all."

"Thanks, Kurt!" Zeo shouted, running the second guard through and then swinging him into the third. They both toppled through the splintered hole in the bridge deck.

"Yeah, yeah." He finally got Marle high enough that she could grab the railing and pull herself up.

"Now what?" she said.

There was a huge hole in Zenan Bridge. They were standing in the middle of five bodies of questionable humanity in Guardian armor. Traffic was backed up in both directions, because everyone had stopped to stare at the noise and excitement. Posters of all of them were going to be on every tree and wall in Guardia tomorrow morning, and any vestige of Marle's cover was entirely shot.

"Um," Kurt said. "Did you ever want to be a time traveler?"

"I've been kidnapped by idiots," Marle said. Then she pulled off her dress, revealing her Red Rose costume and weapons underneath, though she left her mask off. She put a fresh string on her bow from a sealed pouch at her belt. "All right, idiots, north or south?"

"South," Kurt said.

"And quickly," Fina added. "The King's men from the northern end will be here soon, even through this crowd."

"Wait." Zeo cleaned his katana on the splintered edge of the hole, and sheathed it. He left Mune in his hand, and turned to face the stunned, staring crowd of jammed traffic. "Guardia!" They flinched back. He pointed at Marle. "This is your princess, Guardia. Your future. Her Highness Aliza. She was arrested today, by the king, for protesting his tyranny, his rule by fear. Arrested," Zeo pointed Mune at a fallen guard, "by the same cowardly thugs, their faces hidden by armor, that come in the night and make your friends, _your family_ disappear." Some of this he'd heard from Crono and Lucca and his grandmother, some he'd deduced from what he knew about DuFrey, some he'd guessed from his history lessons.

He held up Mune. "Long ago, there was a rebellion against an evil queen. When the people rose up against her, they went into her palace carrying a knife, carved from dreamstone, as the visible sign of their hope. Now your hope has a new sign, not a red knife but a Red Rose. The time will come, Guardia, when we will return, and the Red Rose will lead you into the halls of that king who has betrayed his trust, his duty, and his family." There was a gust of wind that ruffled Zeo's clothes and hair. He'd been expecting it - there was always wind on Zenan Bridge. "Guardia! This is the wind of a new age!"

"The Red Rose!" someone shouted from the crowd. His answer was so prompt that Zeo was sure this wasn't the first revolutionary speech he'd attended. It was a bad sign for DuFrey that there was someone like that in a randomly chosen crowd. "The red knife and the Red Rose!"

Even worse, the crowd followed his lead. "The red knife and the Red Rose!" they thundered.

"Okay," Zeo said over his shoulder. "_Now_ we go south." The crowd parted, and they went at a jog. The soldiers coming up behind them were going to have a much harder time.

"That was well done, Zeo," Fina said. The words were quiet and mild, but Zeo grinned.

"Yeah, well. It's good to finally get a chance to use all those rhetoric lessons." He looked at Marle, obviously expecting agreement.

"We've wasted enough time," she snarled. Kurt winced, and sighed. "Run faster."

"Wow, what crawled up your butt?" Zeo did run faster, though. "Hopefully we can do this without the giant monster skeleton," he joked.

"No kidding," Kurt panted.

There were shouts and ripples in the crowd in front of them. "Did your brilliant plan include a way to deal with the soldiers at the _Southern_ checkpoint?" Marle asked. Zeo looked at Kurt. Kurt opened his mouth to explain that he had no idea, but he needed his breath. He just shook his head. Together they looked at Fina, who shrugged.

"Figures." She cupped her hands to her mouth. "Lieutenant!" she shouted. She pushed toward the oncoming soldiers. "Lieutenant!"

"One side, move to one - Princess! Are you all right?"

"Yes, I'm fine. Go help the rescue efforts, and send a runner back to the checkpoint to tell them I'm coming. Hurry!"

"Yes, Highness!" The officer saluted and ordered his men. Marle continued on imperiously, and the soldiers didn't even look at Zeo and the others.

"That," Marle said, "is how it's done. No stupid delays."

"Yeah," Zeo snapped back, "and in about ten seconds that officer is gonna stop thinking about your face and realize you were wearing the bottom four-fifths of a rebel wanted poster. Your turn to run faster."

"Augh! Stop saying that!" They all turned to look at Kurt. "Some people... need to _walk_... once in a while!"

"You okay?" Zeo said. "We still have to move."

"Yeah. But jog. Let's jog."

"Don't worry," Zeo said. "Once we're across the bridge we can lose 'em in Fiona's Forest."

"Fiona's what?" Marle stared at him. They came to the edge of the bridge, and instead of the deep, shadowy, three-hundred-year-old forest Kurt knew, there was only dry stones and blowing sand. "It's the San Dorino Desert. Obviously your tutor skipped the geography lessons." Zeo and Kurt stared at the wasteland.

The guard that had been sent back ran up to them. "Princess, who are these people? Why are you wearing that - " Whack. He collapsed to the ground, already snoring. Fina shrugged and shouldered her glowing spear.

"If it is desert, it is desert," she said. "Which way, Zeo?"

Zeo had a string tied around Mune, now. He dangled it, let the knife spin. "East. Toward the mountains."

-o-

To Zeo's disgust, Marle knew way more than him about traveling in the desert. It wasn't his fault - _his_ Guardia didn't _have_ a desert.

The pace she set seemed ridiculously slow. But Marle insisted it was the fastest they could go, and that there was no way a large group of soldiers in armor could just charge off into the desert with no preparation. "Tomorrow," she said. "That's when we'll have to watch out."

Toward sundown, Marle left them in the shadow of a large rock, while she went to steal water. It was an oasis, she said, that was all that was left of the town of San Dorino. "Yeah," Zeo said, "but why don't we all go?"

"They can't send out a big enough force to find us," Marle said, "but they'll have sent scouts ahead to hold the oasis."

"So you're going to fight by yourself? That's stupid!"

"Who should I bring, brat? Kurt can barely stand up. Fina can't handle the heat - I've seen her heal herself of heatstroke three times today. You've been force-marching on a wounded leg all day. Don't treat me like a helpless child, Zeo. _I'm_ carrying _your _weight here_._"

"You still can't take them all alone!" Zeo shouted.

"I'm not going to _take_ them, you muscle-bound moron! I'm going to _sneak_ by them. They won't even see me. Don't bother trying to keep up, or I'll have to haul your passed-out butt home on my way back." And she had stalked away. Zeo threw up his hands and ranted behind her back to Kurt and Fina, but he didn't follow. She came back with a gallon pot of water under each arm and a thin scratch across her face. Her quiver was a few arrows emptier than it had been, but she insisted nothing had gone wrong.

Kurt dipped water out of the jug eagerly. Fina dipped a thumb in, and then brushed the water across Marle's cheek. "Honor to the hunters."

She twitched away. "What?"

Fina started, and looked unusually awkward. "I didn't mean to startle you. It is what I did at home, when a hunter went into danger for us all. I did it without thinking."

"But it wasn't dangerous, remember?" Zeo said. "I thought nothing went wrong."

"Don't be an ass, Zeo," Kurt said between gulps.

Zeo rolled his eyes, and drew Mune out of his belt. He dangled it from its string and let it spin. "We came too far south. The gate's that way, toward the mountains."

"Oh, right," Marle snapped back. "We should have just gone in a straight line, missed the oasis, and died of thirst. That would have been _sooo _much better." Marle was drinking, too. Reluctantly, Zeo scooped his cup into the jug.

"Seriously, guys," Kurt said, "knock it off. Don't ruin a good day."

"Good day?" Zeo stared at him. "We're hot and tired and thirsty…"

"And about to be _cold_ and tired and thirsty," Marle added.

"And we're all an inch taller from sand in our boots."

"And we nearly killed you and Fina from thirst getting here."

"And Marle nearly got her face chopped off stealing you water."

"And if Zeo puts weight on his knee again he'll fall on his ass." They glared at each other again. "So what makes this a good day?"

"We blew up the Infinite Boredom Wagon," Kurt said, "and threw the pieces in the ocean."

Zeo laughed, and it only took Marle a split second to get the joke name and laugh too. "Okay, okay," Zeo said, "sorry.

"Whatever," Marle said, "it's nothing. Drink the water or you'll die."

-o-

Zeo woke in the middle of the night. He froze, listening for the sound that had woke him. There was nothing, except for the desert wind and Kurt's snoring. But Zeo's knee hurt like fire. Had he woken himself moaning? That hadn't happened since before the jailbreak.

He propped himself up on one elbow and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. Kurt and Fina were asleep. Marle had taken the first watch. She was perched on top of the rock that sheltered their campsite, bow in hand and an arrow notched to the string. Zeo grabbed his sword belt, laying beside him, and ambled over to lean against the rock. "You can sack out, Marle. I'm awake anyway."

Marle shrugged. "I don't need much sleep. Leg bothering you?"

Pretty badly, yeah. The run through the desert must have worn it out. "Nah, it's fine."

For a while, they were silent, staring in different directions into the cold desert night. "Look," Zeo said. "I know you don't want to be here. You have your own fight. Just go ahead and leave now. I can take the watch, no one else will see you go. I'll tell them you saw a signal flare or something and had to go off on some secret mission."

Marle sighed. "Let's ignore, for a minute, the fact that you pick friends who are all smarter than you and then you think you can lie to them."

"Tch..."

"My fight is now a sideshow. A dead end. You people are going to go back in time and change it all. You find your Gate thing and go in, and suddenly I was never born and my war never happened. Or was never needed, or something. So what exactly am I supposed to go do?" She sounded quietly furious.

"Boy," Zeo said sarcastically. "For someone who's never done it, you sure know a lot about how time travel works."

"You're the ones who told me..."

"Marle, I was never born _now._ Neither was Kurt. None of this makes any sense. But if Kurt and I let a little paradox stop us from doing what we had to do, you and Lucca and... and Crono would have died in the jailbreak. So don't talk to me about 'never been born.'"

"I'll say it again, Zeo. What am I supposed to do?"

"How should I know? Freedom fighter stuff. Save _Guardia_, Marle."

"Tch." Zeo blinked. Is that how he sounded when he was annoyed? "You care about this kingdom more than it deserves."

"You don't know what _your_ kingdom can be, _Princess_ Aliza. Go find out. I don't want anyone with us who has somewhere better to be."

Marle didn't have a snappy comeback for that. They kept a quiet watch for a few minutes. "So," Marle said eventually, "I sneak away in the night, and slip between the search parties coming up behind us. I can't get back across the bridge, so I go south. I find someone in Porre who knows the countersign to a Truce recognition code, and I'm somehow lucky enough that this convenient person isn't a royalist spy. They sneak me on a ferry, get me back to Truce, I report in at headquarters. And you know what they say?"

She actually paused, as if Zeo would know the answer. "I dunno. 'Hello?'"

"They say, 'Well, what are you doing _here_, Marle? Didn't you say the target was in the Denadoro Mountains?' Crono and Lucca made you a Red Rose mission. Apparently this _is_ freedom fighter stuff."

Zeo shook his head. "Even if we find a Gate and leave this time, I'm not gonna be able to stop thinking about the other Guardia. I want to be sure someone's taking care of it."

Marle snorted. "Join the club. I have stopped thinking about the other Guardia exactly zero times since you told us who you were." She stood and stretched, loosening the muscles that would have gotten tight from sitting still through a long watch. "I say Crono would want me to stay with you. Unless you think you know him better than I do?"

Damn. Zeo _did_ know him better, he'd grown up with him and Marle hadn't. But Dad had told him not to tell her that, and anyway she was right. "Fine. You're with us all the way to the Gate?"

"To the end, whatever end you think you're going to find in those mountains. But I'm not following orders from you."

Zeo chuckled. "Marle, who do you think _is_ following orders from me? My genius best friend who doesn't believe in monarchy? The woman who was leading people twelve thousand years before I was born?"

"Yeah, sure. Well, whatever it is you think they do when you tell them things, I won't be doing it."

"Oh, good," Zeo said. "It'll be nice to have _one_ person who doesn't make fun of me."

-o-

Fina had never seen mountains in her own time. She had seen the plains, and the bogs, and the gently rolling things her clan had called hills. Once she had been to the forest, and another time she had gone to the edge of the sea, and looked out at the eternal grey water.

The rescue of Zeo's father had begun with Kurt's grapple, pulling them up one at a time to the bridge. When the rope had carried Fina above the trees, she had seen the mountains in the twilit distance, and her breath had stopped. She'd had no idea, no concept, that the land itself could form something so magnificent. Fortunately the rope took a while to pull her up, and she'd had time to hide her feelings, as was the way when among hunters. (Some customs were apparently the same in every age.)

Now the Denadoro range was filling the northern sky, and they were to walk right up their face, like climbing straight into Hell. Fina looked around at her friends, wondering if they felt as she did. Zeo had on that sharp-eyed half-smile he had when he was about to do something painful on purpose. He was probably thinking of his knee. Marle was looking behind them again, worried about pursuit. Kurt just looked tired.

Zeo held up his spirit-knife, spinning on its string to point their way. "Still on the right trail?" Fina asked. Zeo nodded. The knife was pointed forward and, alarmingly, upward.

"I think I've got the spot on the map, too," Kurt said. He had these fascinating pictures of the land, which Fina had studied a little over his shoulder. They'd been made in his own world, not this one, but the mountains were the same even if the forest was gone. "We can keep going through valleys a little longer before we have to really climb, but we can't get around it forever, the Gate is apparently up in the peaks."

"Let's stay off the hilltops as long as we can," Marle said. "They could see us from miles away, up there."

The march across the desert had been horrible. Fina had not known that parched heat could be as unpleasant as cold snow. If the spirits had not helped her, she thought she would have died. The march up the mountains was wearying, but exhilarating. They climbed up, and up, and up, and looking back and down the view was thrilling, an incredible vista coupled with the shock and fear of climbing into the sky. Fina didn't know how Kurt and Marle could look so grim with that to look at, no matter how tired or worried they were. She did catch Zeo in flashes of good humor. His eyes would watch the air – or probably, the familiar spirit of his knife - and he'd smile just a bit. Perhaps, Fina thought, you had to be in tune with the spirits to love these terrifying mountains. Perhaps this feeling was the joy of the spirits singing in their blood.

They came over streams and rocks, around ridges and cliffs, until they came up a canyon that ended in a steep fall of rocks. Water gurgled down over the boulders, turning them into a dozen little waterfalls. "Damn," Marle sighed. "Serves us right, trying to cut a straight line through mountains," she said, though they hadn't been. "How far will we have to backtrack?"

"Who said we were backtracking?" Kurt said, catching his breath. "There's really no easy way up there anyway. We might as well start climbing now."

Fina pointed at the falls. "We're going to climb _that_?" The stones would be slime-slick with water. It would be like climbing a sheet of ice.

Zeo tilted his head at it. "Maybe for fun, after I get home, but I don't think it's a good idea right now." And then, absently, "As much swimming as climbing. Maybe if I took my clothes off?" Fina smirked at that image. Marle made a face like she'd smelled rotten meat. Kurt, looking embarrassed, managed a meaningful cough. "Oh," Zeo said, "Right, well, it'll probably be easier if we just go up the side." He pointed to the right, where the canyon wall was much dryer but also steeper, with only a few boulders before it became a vertical cliff.

"Sure," Marle said, "but we still have to get Kurt and Fina up." She looked at Zeo's leg. "Besides…"

"You know," Kurt interrupted, "if I had any other best friend, no one would be able to pull that wimpy-bookworm stereotype on me. I look like a wimp because I'm tagging along with His Impossible Highness over there. Can you imagine trying to keep up with Zeo for your _whole life?_ Think you'd be a wimp after that?" Fina laughed. She'd nearly killed herself keeping up with Zeo (and Marle) for the last two days, and that was with Zeo slowed by his knee. She couldn't imagine it if he'd been hale. "I _like_ rock climbing. It helps me think. And I can totally get up that cliff."

Marle raised an eyebrow. "All right. Get out your grapple and show me."

"I meant I could free-climb it," Kurt said. "I shouldn't use the multigun, it'll echo like thunder and someone back there might be listening. We're in a hurry, though, so I'll probably cheat and use the power gauntlet."

"And since you can keep up with Zeo, you think you can keep up with me?" Marle challenged.

"What, a race? I'm always willing to lose a race. Hey, Zeo," he said, just as Zeo was limping toward the cliff, "could you wait down here? Someone needs to rig a harness for Fina. She's no wimp either, but I don't think the Clan of the White Seal had rock climbing. We'll probably have to pull her up."

"Oh," Zeo said. "Yeah, sure." Fina saw something in his eyes, a flash of jealousy. Kurt didn't catch it, he'd already turned away. He pulled on his gauntlet, and stepped up to the boulders, a few paces away from Marle. No one called out the start of the race, they just looked at each other and began to move.

They scrambled over the boulders and attacked the cliff, somehow finding handholds and footholds in what looked like sheer rock to Fina's eyes. Kurt had predicted correctly, though: he was going to lose the race. He used his gauntlet shamelessly, hanging from its tireless grip while his other hand and both feet reached for better holds, but Marle climbed like an ordinary person would walk: sure and steady, because there was nothing worth noticing to slow her down. She rolled over the top of the cliff, turned to look down, and saw Kurt two or three body lengths below her.

"I wonder if Zenan the Great's best friend got underestimated, too?" Kurt panted, still climbing. "I know Sir Cyrus' did."

"You're comparing that brat to the founder of Guardia and the greatest knight in history?" Marle snorted. "Don't make me…"

CRACK

Kurt lost his grip, and fell dangling from his gauntlet. He swung by his arm from the face of the cliff. Blood colored his tunic, not in drops or splashes but in the steady soaking of a deep wound. Marle and Zeo were yelling. Fina did not understand.


End file.
